Schism
by notmanos
Summary: Bob asks the X Men to help him track a dangerous mutant, but in the end they have to fight one of their own.
1. Part 1

Disclaimer:The character of Logan & all X Men is  owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright infringement intended. Bob is still mine - hands off. 

N.B.: Takes place shortly after the "X Men" movie, and AOTN. 

    Schism 

1 

The Day Before 

    Miranda Bloom didn't know which she hated more: her life or this town.She couldn't really decide, so she decided to hate them both. 

Actually, if she was to be honest, she hated it all. 

She walked down the pitted grey sidewalk, kicking aside any stray litter that blew in her path, candy bar wrappers and crushed McDonald's and Starbucks cups, and mentally cursed everything and everyone in this dirtball mountain town. 

Maplewood was supposed to be some sort of pastoral California paradise for yuppies scared of the big bad urban landscapes, a suburban hideaway tucked in the shadow of Mount Shasta, a community planned down to the last detail. 

And so fucking dull and awful it proved that the planners had no children, or inner life, or concept of how human beings lived. 

Her mother liked it here. But her mother was a clueless bitch, so why not? She would like these bland little houses with their cookie cutter sameness, their little golf course green perfect lawns no bigger than a parking spot, the gravel driveways with their Saturns and BMW's and Road Rangers and Explorers. This place was soulless and dead; it was a graveyard and yet no one seemed to know it. 

Scraggly maples lined the walk leading up to the high school, a sterile white and tan building that looked like a converted aircraft hangar or factory in the cold light of early morning, and she paused to glare hatefully at it, and the students milling around in front of it like zombies. 

She hated the school with a vengeance. If being boring wasn't enough of a crime, the kids who went were the absolute last straw. As privileged and dull as their sheep like parents, no one cared they were all as dumb as a bag of hammers as long as the football team kept winning games. Then there were the preening queen bitches who seemed to think they were instantly better than anyone simply because they were able to stick their fingers down their throats at regular intervals. 

And her head hurt. Her head hurt all the time now, like her skull was full of molten lead, but did her goddamn mother believe her? No - she figured she was just trying to get out of going to school, or just a migraine, which "everyone" has. 

Did everyone feel like their head was going to split open like an overripe melon? Did everyone feel like they were always two seconds away from cranial detonation? 

God, she hated it; she hated it all. She hated her stupid fucking life and her stupid fucking mother and this stupid fucking town. 

As yet another Road Ranger pulled into the school's large parking lot, she muttered bitterly, "I wish this whole goddamn town didn't exist." 

A strange feeling overcame her, a sort of tingling sensation, pins and needles all over her body, and then things...changed. 

It was like reality was been wiped away, like the cosmos was hitting the 'delete' button: the street on one side of her faded away, while the school and all the people around it seemed to disappear into thin air, leaving nothing but dirt and foliage behind, trees and shrubs, the valley that existed before the planned community ever did. It all fell away, like someone had stopped the projector on the film of her life. 

Miranda dropped her heavy backpack on the ground, which was nothing more than an overgrown field of weeds now, a dense copse of Ponderosa pines replacing the spot where the school once was, a small stream and a large clump of blackberry bushes taking up the space where the sickly maples and the street used to be. 

Birds twittered and flew through the branches as she looked around in disbelief, and while the sky was still a cold blue grey, it didn't seem as hostile now. She felt kind of dizzy, but it wasn't a bad feeling. Not at all. 

Had she done this? Had she made it all go away? Had she erased the existence of not only an entire town, but everyone else in it? 

Cool. 

** 

Tokyo, Japan 

    They went to the Shinjuku Imperial Gardens and sat on one of the meditation benches (Scott thought they were park benches - ha) near the main pond, where huge white swans glided across the still surface of the water like flower petals on the wind. Nariko hadn't been hard to convince, mainly because she wanted to believe she could escape her life. 

She could speak and understand a little English, but not much, and not if they talked fast. In deference to Scott, she tried to speak English whenever she could, but Logan was still acting as translator for the most part. 

Scott sat at the far end of the cold stone bench, trying to be as non-threatening as possible (easy), and Logan sat on the end nearest the pond, beneath the juniper tree allowed to grow as tall as an evergreen, its lowering branches drooping like a willow. The scent of it was strong, but he liked it; juniper fragrance was better than the desperation stink of 'Sin City' any day. 

Nariko sat in the center of the bench, elbows resting on her knees, her posture not one of discomfort more than surrender: she almost didn't care what happened to her anymore. 

From what they had been able to get out of her, her life had been no more fragmented than anyone else's: her parents divorced when she was young, and she basically lived with her mother until last year, when their fractious relationship exploded - Nariko had not clarified whether she had been kicked out of the house or ran away. But she moved in with her father then, and shortly after started to work at his restaurant. It wasn't too long afterwards that she found out her father didn't really make his money from sushi. 

He didn't share most of this information with Scott, but Nariko's father started out as a money launderer, but had recently expanded into working as a front for a drug running operation, mostly unprocessed opium coming in from China and Hong Kong. She thought it was a local gang affiliated with the Yakuza, but she really didn't know. All she knew was they were increasingly violent men, and she hated them all, her "spineless" father included. 

They told her about the school, blah blah blah, and whether she believed it was beside the point; she wanted to believe. 

It was incredibly peaceful here. The birds spoke with sweet voices, the breeze was anemic but musically rustled the leaves of the deciduous trees, made the colorful heads of chrysanthemums and zinnias nod as if agreeing with Nariko's tale of woe. In spite of the sun, it smelled like rain, and Logan could almost imagine the plash of water on leaves, water on water, the loamy smell of damp earth. 

Man, he was starting to doze off. Bob should have warned him about the dimensional shifting throwing off the body clock. 

"What happened the other night?" Logan asked her, in Japanese. They'd already made it clear the 'energy expenditure' was how they found her. She seemed extremely reluctant to talk about it. 

She looked up, tucking a strand of her ebony hair behind her ear, and asked, in halting English, "What are your powers?" She glanced at Scott too, so he was included. 

Scott, Boy Scout that he was, tried first. "I basically store energy in my body that's released in a coherent energy beam through - " 

Nariko was already shaking her head, and she looked at Logan questioningly for interpretation of so many odd English words. He tried to think of a succinct way to put it. "He shoots beams out his eyes,"  he finally told her. "That's why he wears the funny glasses." 

Her hazel widened in both surprise and awe. She looked sharply at Scott, and then tried to surreptitiously scoot a little farther away from him. Scott scowled at him. "What did you tell her I have?" 

"Just the truth." 

If a frown could be said to be dubious, Scott's was. 

"Yours?" She asked in English, looking at him. 

Logan shrugged, and replied in the same language, "I heal fast." 

"Uh, I think you're leaving something out," Scott interjected. 

Nariko had cocked her head, with a look on her face that quite clearly said 'That's all?' But it was all she needed to know right now. 

"She's freaked out enough as it is," he told him. A lie wrapped in a kind of truth. "I don't need to make it worse by telling her I'm some sort of fuckin' claw guy with an unbreakable skeleton." 

Scott grimaced. "Well, if you put it that way, it does sound freaky." 

"Hey." 

Nariko looked between them during the exchange, and asked him, reverting to her native tongue, "There's more, isn't there?" 

He shook his head, and replied - again, in Japanese (and how strange was it to realize he could slip in and out of these languages without a second thought? He was roughly sure he could start speaking asides in French too, and never mix any of them up, or trip over his own tongue) - "Nothing major. I think it's your turn to share. What happened?" She glanced down at rosy hued cherry blossoms blowing across the dirt path, and he guessed: "Does it involve the men your father work for?" 

She looked up sharply, and he knew he had gotten it in one. Fear shined in her eyes like stars. 

Scott realized something had happened, he looked between them with curiosity creasing his brow, but he waited to see what else happened. 

She rubbed her palms on her knees, just brushing the hem of her short skirt, and reached down to grab a rock from the path. It was a small stone about the side of your average brussel sprout (and probably just as appetizing). "See what it is?" She said, her words stiff and foreign in her mouth. She handed it to Scott, who played along, looking at it and saying, "It's a rock." 

She nodded and took it from his hand, turning to hand it to him. But Logan made no move to take it. "It's a stone, darlin', we get that. What's the point?" 

She squeezed the rock in her hand,and said, once more in uncomfortable English, "No more." Nariko handed it back to Scott, and he took it with some wariness. 

"Nariko, it feels - oh shit," he exclaimed, as he squeezed the rock, and his fingers sank into it like the stone was nothing more than soft flesh. Logan knew Scott wasn't that strong - and pulverized bits of it weren't flying everywhere - so something weird had happened. "Logan, it's clay." 

He leaned past Nariko and handed it to him. As soon as Logan had it he could tell the difference in density; the weight of clay had a different feel than the weight of stone. He gave it a tentative squeeze to make sure it was clay all the way through and not just for the first few centimeters (it was solid clay - impressive), then gave it back to her, saying to Scott, "She morphed it?" 

He started to shrug, but then hesitated. "I think she's a kind of mutant that can alter the molecular structure of other things." 

"Like Kitty." 

"Yes, but she has to alter herself at the same time as she's in contact with it, and can only do it in a specific way: solid or not. Nariko didn't turn to clay." 

He had to agree with that. So he asked her, in Japanese, "Can you change anything to anything else?" 

Nariko considered that, squeezing the stone colored ball of clay in her palm."Pretty much. If I can think about it, I can do it." 

"Anything to anything," he said to Scott in English. He then asked her, in Japanese, "On contact?" 

She nodded. "I tried to do it by thinking about it once, but it didn't work. I have to touch it and think about it at the same time." 

"On contact,"he told Scott, and then jumped back to Japanese."So what happened the other night?" 

She scuffed a pattern in the dirt with the toe of her brightly tie dyed tennis shoe and looked down, her dark hair veiling her face, as she said, "These guys...they worked for Yamamoto, I think..." 

"Recognized that name," Scott said. Since she was speaking in Japanese, that was all he could recognize. 

But she ignored him and went on. "Anyways, they grabbed me after work. They said something about making sure my father made good on his debts, or something." She paused to sniff and wipe slow tears from her face. She was barely crying, and it seemed more from shame than anything else. "I wanted them to let go of me, but they wouldn't." 

"What did you do to them?" 

She glanced up at him,her eyes brimming with tears, but there was also a deep defiance there. She wasn't sad; she was angry. "I told them to let me go, and they wouldn't. So I...I wished they would die. I turned them to stone." 

"All the way through?" 

She nodded. "I think they're still in an alley off Yasukuni." 

"What happened?" Scott asked, figuring some progress had been made. 

"There was an accident," he lied. If they were going to attack a sixteen year old girl, those low life fuckers deserved whatever they got. Turning them to stone was far too humane.  "Some of the thugs after her dad grabbed her,to kidnap her or maybe kill her as a warnin' to her dad - I ain't tellin' her that - and she got freaked out and - " 

Scott grimaced. "What did she do to them?" 

"You remember what the Gorgons did in mythology?" 

"What?" He had to think about that a moment. "Turn people to-" his mouth fell open for a second, then he got it under control. "She turned them to stone? Are they dead?" 

Logan scowled at him. "What do you think? She turned them into life sized yard gnomes. Would you live through that?" 

Scott looked away, towards one of the stone lanterns that lined the side of the path every few meters. Unlike things in an American park, they had clearly never been vandalized. "Accidents happen, hospital sunroof guy." Scott's good two shoes tendencies really had no place here, especially if it was the Yakuza they were dealing with. Human or not, they were brutal, and wouldn't have hesitated to part Nariko out a piece at a time to get what they wanted. 

He looked at him with a deep frown, not appreciating the reminder, and said, "Was it an accident, Logan? Even if it was, two men are dead." 

"Two mafiosos who were going to dismember a teenage girl and send bits of her to her father in the mail are dead," he corrected him. 

"You don't know that," Scott shot back. 

"I'm glad they're dead," she muttered sullenly in Japanese, wiping away the rest of her angry tears with the back of her hand. Fuck the cultural norms; this girl was a fighter. 

(Like his Mariko...) 

"Yeah, I do. Have you ever dealt with the Yakuza before?" 

Scott crossed his arms over his chest, a stubborn look on his face. "Do we know its Yakuza? And you're telling me you've dealt with the Yakuza before?" 

"Yeah." He didn't bother to clarify which question he was answering. 

Scott just guessed. "I thought you said you couldn't remember ever being in Japan." 

"Who said I dealt with 'em in Japan?" 

Scott continued giving him the death scowl, and Nariko had been watching them intently, looking from Scott to him and back as if watching a tennis match. It was clear that, even though she couldn't follow their rapid fire English conversation, she could guess from their vocal inflections and body language that he was more sympathetic to her cause than Scott. But she remained wary, and for good reason - how did she know this wasn't some version of 'good cop bad cop'? 

In the meantime, she had transmutated the stone from clay to rubber, and was now bouncing it idly on the stone path. Right now her power didn't seem like great shakes, but he knew she could be quite powerful. She'd already proven she could be deadly. 

Something suddenly occurred to Logan. "Do they know what you did to their men?" He asked her, in Japanese. 

It seemed to take her a moment to understand what he meant by 'they', and then her eyes widened, the smell of fear coming off of her rich and new. "I don't know. Oh shit. They'll really kill me now, won't they?" 

"Won't get the chance," he assured her. "We'll leave now." He didn't want to tell her killing her was only one option. It was equally possible they'd want to bribe, coerce, or force her to work for them. 

"Now? She repeated, stunned. But she wasn't protesting; she was just surprised they could leave so fast. "I need to get my stuff." 

"We can get you new stuff." He pointed out. But she had that mulish look on her face that all teenage girls seemed to master, the one that said "as if" better than words ever could. 

He stood, sighing. "Fine. But we have to make it fast." 

"No problem," she agreed, getting to her feet. She transmuted the stone back to its original form, and dropped it on the path. 

"What?" Scott asked, standing up himself. 

"We'll run by her dad's place, let her get some things, then we're leaving." 

"Whoa, wait a minute," Scott said, holding up his hands to stop Nariko from walking away. She glanced at him, confused. "We have to talk this over with at least one of her parents." 

Logan rolled his eyes and threw out his hands in disbelief. "Her mother ain't speakin' to her, and her Dad wants to keep her here to help him work off his mob debt. We'll take her now, and let Xavier do the retroactive reassurance thing. You know he's better at that than any of us, and do you really think I can charm the trust from anyone?" 

That got him. Scott surrendered with a sigh, and let Nariko lead the way down the garden path. "I know there's a lot you're not telling me," Scott whispered accusingly. 

"The girl's probably on a hit list. You wanna split hairs? Let's do it somewhere else." 

Scott gave him as an evil look as he could with his eyes covered by that visor, but at least he consented to have this argument later. 

They always argued later. 

Since her father's house was only a couple of blocks from the Shinjuku Gyoenmae it was all decided that they walk, in spite of the looks they got from fellow pedestrians on the street. They were Japanese, so they tried not to be too overt about it, but it was impossible not to notice the double takes, feel the eyes of even surreptitious glances. Of course, two weird looking white dudes walking down the street with a teenaged Japanese girl were bound to attract attention outside of Kabukicho; there, it wouldn't even earn a second glance. But everyone learned not to look twice in Sin City, or remember faces. Things like that could come back to bite you on the ass. 

Even outside of Kabukicho. 

Logan never looked directly, but as they turned the corner, a block away from her father's house, he noticed Nariko was leading them through a wide, clean alley. 

"Why are we goin' this way?" He asked her, in her native language. 

"It's a shortcut." She gave him a curious look, interpreting the troubled expression on his face. "What's wrong?" 

"A couple of seconds ago, I saw the same black Mazda drive by us for the second time," he told Scott, in English. He looked around, surprised, while Logan told her, in Japanese, "There may be trouble. I want you to do what I say when I say it, okay?" 

Now she looked around, just like Scott, as Logan placed a hand on the small of her back and started urging her down the alley ahead of him. It was so clean there were few places for good cover, and the alley cut between a lower rent store and what looked like some kind of hair salon: again, no real cover options. 

"Are you sure it was the same car?" Scott asked skeptically. "Even if it was, it could just be someone who's lost." 

"Have I ever been wrong about bein' watched?" He replied, annoyed. 

Scott grimaced sourly, but admitted, "No. Your paranoia usually pays off." 

"It ain't paranoia if you're right." It was then he heard the sound of acceleration on a road where it was so packed with cars it was rare, and the noise echoed - starting from right in front of them. 

"Headed this way!" He shouted to Scott, just as he saw a dark blur which could only be the car skidding around the back end of the alley. 

    2 

    Logan grabbed Nariko around the waist, picked her up and spun around, making her shout in surprise, and took them to the wall, his body still between hers and the car as the first muffled gunshots (of course they were using silencers) rang out. He thought he felt a sting like a hard slap somewhere near his left shoulder blade. 

Scott shot a powerful beam from his visor - a glimmer of red in the corner of his eye - that caught the car straight on, making it fly up as if swatted by a wrecking ball. Thrown over on its top, it rolled a number of times, spitting broken glass and fragments of metal before finally coming to rest on its crumpled roof. 

"Fucking hell," Nariko said, in perfectly clear English. 

It was funny which words were the easiest to learn. 

"Well, it was only a Mazda," he told her, putting her down. 

"I didn't mean to hit it that hard," Scott admitted. 

But Logan heard shifting in the wreckage, and started heading towards the car. He saw movement then,heard the click of a seatbelt being undone, and found it hard to believe that someone had survived that ride. But obviously someone had. 

"Logan, you've been hit," Scott said flatly. He was just pointing it out. 

But he already knew, and he didn't care. Sure, he could feel the bullet wedged beneath his skin like an icy stone, and the wound throbbed as his skin and muscle started to mend itself, knitting around the foreign object and oh so subtly forcing it out, millimeter by excruciating millimeter, like a slow motion reverse of the bullet entering his body in the first place. And judging from a similar pain in his right thigh, he'd actually been hit twice. 

He saw a stretched out arm, smelled blood (not his), and saw, as the man started to squirm out of the car, he still had a gun in his hand. 

Logan broke into a run. 

"Don't kill him!" Scott shouted, as the man crawled out of the car and raised the gun. 

Logan reached him before he could pull the trigger. He kicked the gun out of the man's hand, and as he seemed to reach back for another weapon, he kicked him in the face and put him down. 

But that gave his friend on the other side time to pull himself up and shoot, point blank into Logan's face. 

The bullet bounced off his cheekbone as Nariko screamed, and the shooter, whose face was half covered in blood from a gash that had opened up his scalp, gaped in wide eyed astonishment as Logan not only remained standing, but snarled at him for trying such a cowardly, punk ass stunt. 

Logan grabbed the man's arm and pulled him over the car violently, as Scott shouted again, "Don't kill him!" 

The man screamed in pain as his shoulder dislocated with a hollow pop,and Logan slammed him violently to the pavement. 

The man landed on his back with a thud that hid the crackling of bones on impact, and while Logan had hoped to squeeze the asshole for information, he was not only out cold, but he wasn't sure the guy's skull didn't fracture. 

He wanted to make sure of it, he really did. But he turned and unleashed some of his pent up fury on the car - in two kicks, he had not only completely crumpled the door inward, but it fell off, hanging on by a single hinge. 

"Fucking hell," Nariko said again, as he started stalking back towards them. There was no other conscious person in the car, and if there was, they were wisely playing dead. 

"What the hell was that don't kill him shit," he spat at Scott. He wasn't sure what pissed him off more: Scott attempting to give him orders, Scott assuming he'd gut the guys, or presuming that he shouldn't kill these wastes of space. 

"The girl, Logan," Scott said back, his voice taut with anger. He could smell the adrenaline zinging through Scott's blood from here. Scott was dying for a fight but was absolutely not going to acknowledge it. "Isn't she freaked out enough?" 

"So," Nariko said (in Japanese), remarkably calm for a freaked out person (although he could smell the fear coming from her). "He shoots lasers, and you...you're the toughest guy on Earth?" 

He shrugged.Close enough. 

She stared at him in such a way that he knew his face had only now finished healing up. His face usually healed fast, so maybe the other bullet wounds slowed things down. 

Behind him, he heard the car door finally fall off and hit the pavement. Both Nariko and Scott jumped, but he knew there had been no activity behind it: he heard the small, dying creaks of a hinge finally giving way under the relentless tug of gravity. "There's probably more on the way, hero," Logan snarled at Scott. Truth was, Scott didn't want him to kill them for him, not Nariko. "So what's say we get a move on and get her gear before you're forced to kill, huh?" 

If Scott could have given him a death glare, he would have right now. 

"Are we going?" Nariko asked, sounding more impatient than frightened. But her knees were shaking, and he knew it wasn't due to the cold. 

Logan nodded. 

"Is she all right?" Scott asked, reluctantly turning away from the wreckage. 

"Hangin' in there?" He asked her. 

She nodded, glancing at Scott as well. She then shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, hugging herself for comfort and warmth. 

He felt for the kid. Maybe she wanted to go to Xavier's just for protection from the Yakuza. Her parents couldn't give her that. 

Logan took off his leather jacket and handed it to her (noticing the bullet hole in the back. Ah hell, how was he going to fix that?). "It's warm," he said, and with a wary look, she took it with a nod. 

"Thank you," she said, slipping it on. It seemed to swallow her, hang off of her like a half open parachute. Was he that big, or was she that small? 

Noting that Scott was studying him (What? He couldn't do nice things?), he glanced back at the angry ruin of the car, crumpled like an empty cigarette pack, and said wryly, "I hope that wasn't a rental. 'Cause they ain't getting their deposit back." 

Man. Scott had no sense of humor whatsoever. 

** 

Los Angeles, California 

    The freight elevator doors opened on a familiar scene: the swinging underground bachelor pad, which was really just Luke's cocoon, a way to keep on top of the world without actually being a part of it. 

"Good day, darlin'," Bob called, not seeing her among the maze like bookshelves that took up the far side of the room. No person who had ever come to the Black Star Gallery would ever know its main artist lived in a secret basement. "You called me?" 

The same overstuffed blue sofa was in front of the same oversized aquarium embedded in the wall, although she got several new jewel toned fish, saltwater natives in bright metallic yellow and blue, a brilliant contrast to their white sand and orange coral abode. The smaller screens surrounding the tank showed mostly security camera footage, although one was off (the t.v. screen), and another was running some kind of computer program. 

"Would it have killed ya to teleport?" Luke snapped,coming around the side of the farthest bookcase. She was dressed in her usual casual clothes, long sleeved purple t-shirt and blue jeans, barefoot as if he caught her shortly after getting up. 

"I didn't know it was that urgent." 

"I called ya and asked ya to come as soon as possible! Shite!" She cursed, throwing her hands in the air. Whenever his granddaughter got angry,her Northumbrian accent got more pronounced. 

Admittedly, Luke was generally angry, and she didn't call him a lot. A check in around the holidays, mostly. Not that she didn't like him, but she was a natural recluse, and pretty much avoided everyone. He thought it was odd she'd call, but she didn't sound especially upset. She sounded pissed off, but she almost always sounded pissed. 

The elegant young woman gestured aggressively for him to sit on the couch, and he did, happy to play along with her. "Computer, display file arse one," she said, sitting on the arm of the sofa. 

"Voice controlled," he said, nodding. "Neat. Like your file names as well." 

She simply made a noise of agreement, folding her hands on her thigh. "Remember that deadbeat Guldar demon I was lookin' up for Shiar?" 

No, he didn't, but he faked it. "Sure. Was there a problem?" 

"Well, yes and no. It wasn't hard to find him, Guldar's ain't that bright, but the where of it was fucked to high heaven. He settled in a bedroom community called Maplewood, near Shasta." 

"I see. And his moving to a suburb is a problem because..? Well, other than bein' a bloody suburb." 

"It's a problem 'cause it doesn't exist anymore. See?" 

The computer screen showed a double layered map: the one beneath showed a satellite photo rich which green swards; the ghostly second image above showed the hard grey and black and brown of a modern human settlement. 

Bob wasn't sure he was following this. "It was blown up?" 

"No. It no longer exists. Or it seems to have ceased existing. It and everyone in it, the Guldar included." 

He realized the layered image was a before and after shot - Maplewood the day before yesterday (image two) ; the area where Maplewood was as of two hours ago (image one). Holy shit. Not only was there no sign of devastation, but it looked like the opposite had happened: the devastation had been removed, and the property had been given back to the land. 

"Magick?" 

"I had Liivas out there. He didn't pick any up." 

Liivas was a Jherik demon, a type who were extremely sensitive to magicks of all kind. If he couldn't find it, there was nothing to find. 

She then gave him a light backhanded slap on the shoulder. "Where the fecking hell have you been, anyways?" 

"I was kidnapped - " 

"- by the Old Ones, yeah, I heard that bit, fuckwit. I meant yesterday, when I tried to call ya! Jeeze." 

"Oh. Seki dropped by. She heard about the Old Ones, belatedly, and wanted to make sure I was okay." 

"Seki?" 

"Sekhmet. I think the ancient Egyptians worshiped her for a bit." 

Luke had to think about that for a moment. "Ex wife?" 

"Not officially, no. We were never technically married. Well...it's complicated." And that didn't include the tale of how he met Seki, which was even more complicated, and how most Egyptian mythology got her completely wrong, but what did you expect from such misogynist times? Mythology generally got more wrong than right; it was just one of those things. But frankly, wasn't he glad how much they fucked up? It might have made his life more difficult if they hadn't. 

She snorted derisively. "It's always fecking complicated. Your love life should come with an instruction manual." 

"It couldn't hurt," he admitted. 

"Doesn't she have like a lion head or somethin' ? Isn't she from some weird arse sub-dimension?" 

"Hey, be careful, she rules that weird ass sub-dimension. And you know love is not dictated by looks, Luke." 

She shook her head, mussing up her short brown hair. "That's just another thing that makes you bleedin' weird, Bob." Luke then gestured to the overlapping map of past Maplewood and current nothing, and got back on topic. "So with magick right out there's only two possibilities left. One is we got some demon from another universe who can do shite like this. Possible?" 

He had to think about it a moment. "Yes. There are beinn's from other places that can do some real wild things. They're rare, but hey, rare isn't impossible." 

She nodded in agreement. "That's what I thought. The second possibility is one of those bleedin' freak mutants did it." 

"Hey, watch the freak label - they're the future of humanity, you know." 

"Whoopty fucking do." 

She was such a dyed in the wool cynic. He bet Logan and her would have to have a bleak off to see who was the Alpha Cynic. "And you want me to work that angle?" 

"I want ya to work 'em both," she replied, like he was being deliberately obtuse. 


	2. Part 2

She paused, then continued."I'm busy, you know. But this shite is weird. I mean, if they could make Maplewood completely cease existing..." 

"What's to stop them from erasing Los Angeles, Sydney, Washington D. C., London? Got it." 

"Actually, erasin' Washington D. C. wouldn't be so bad." 

"Agreed. But we probably oughta find out who's behind this." 

She nodded, and they both stared at the static map for a very long moment. So, a town not only disappeared, it completely ceased to exist. But records of its existence still existed, and certainly Luke remembered it, so it wasn't completely falling out of reality. It had been surgicially excised, but random fragments remained, so it wasn't an all powerful being they were dealing with. They were dealing with a powerful being, but not one that could completely alter reality; just big chunks of it. 

Mutant or demon. He rather hoped it was a demon, because he didn't want to know what kind of mutant could get that powerful. 

But at least he knew exactly who he could go to for help with any mutant problems. 

    3 

    Logan seemed to catch his second wind once they got back to the jet, and even though he attempted to take a nap on the flight back to New York, he just wasn't in the mood for sleep. Maybe it was the fact that Scott had finally stopped talking. 

They'd had no further confrontations with Yakuza goons at Nariko's home, or on the way back to the jet, and Logan was rather disappointed. He wanted to take on some more of those idiots, maybe burn off a little excess steam. 

Once they got back to the mansion, he helped introduce Nariko around, and to one of the students who, although from Hawaii, spoke perfectly fluent Japanese. She was also Nariko's age too, so they had things to instantly bond about. Still, he had to ask for his poor bullet torn jacket back, and she seemed reluctant to give it back, but she did. And he heard Scott whisper to Jean, "If one more girl in this place has a crush on him, I'm going to be physically ill." 

He felt like telling Scott there was no point in whispering around him - he could hear it all as plain as day - but if old One Eye didn't know that by now, he wasn't going to let him in on it. 

Logan knew Xavier would want to talk to him, maybe even - god forbid - thank him for bothering to show up in Tokyo, so he scrammed as soon as possible, retreating to his room and shoving the wedge into the crevice of the door, so no one could open it from the outside. (Well, Kitty could just phase in, but she wouldn't; and Jean could blast the door open, but he didn't see that happening either.) 

He took a shower, washing off the dried blood from his now non - existent bullet wounds, and changed into some clothes that didn't have traces of blood in them, although just a pair of jeans: he had no plans, he wasn't supposed to be at the mansion, and he wasn't going to do shit except maybe just chill out. He didn't have a lot of time to do that. 

There was nothing good on the tube, so he put a CD on - The Tragically Hip's "Fully Completely", the mellowest CD he owned - and pulled a book out from beneath his mattress, laying back to continue to read it. 

He hid it beneath his bed because it was the recent Seamus Heaney translation of "Beowulf" - bad enough it was a translation by a poet, but it was some old epic poem itself, and he knew the ribbing he'd take from dickweeds like Scott if he was caught reading it (and he'd probably lose some of his 'cool' cache with the kids. Not that he actually cared what they thought of him, as long as they obeyed him when he gave an order..). But it was actually pretty damn good; hard to believe it was a poem. And hey, it was about a bloody battle against an implacable monster: it could be his life story for all he knew. 

Logan still wasn't sure why he picked the book up in the first place. He'd been in the school's library, and something made him pause-it was a picture on the back of a book that caught his eye. Some prim and severe looking woman, a Russian poet apparently, but he couldn't shake the queer feeling she looked vaguely familiar somehow. And while he was trying to reconcile that, someone came in, and he didn't want to be caught looking at a book of Russian poetry, so he grabbed the first book with a cool cover, and it turned out to be "Beowulf". He had thought, with its picture of an empty chainmail suit of armor and sword, that it had been a book on medieval military history. Sometimes those books could be pretty interesting. 

So he grabbed it on impulse - so why was he reading it? He had no idea. He just was, and even though he knew how it ended, he was sticking with it. Maybe it was just helping him forget that a grainy black and white photo of a homely and very dead persecuted Russian poetess had almost given him a case of deja vu. 

(Oh sure, he was the type to hang with poets. As if.) 

Some time had passed before he realized what was happening here. Lost in the book, the cushion of music protecting him from the rest of the mansion beyond, he slowly realized...wow, was this peace? He was more relaxed than he could ever remember being. And it wasn't his usual sort of peace, the slapdash one that he usually just cobbled together from privacy and loneliness; it was an incredible simulation of peace, but it was always empty, mainly because it wasn't the real thing, just enforced isolation. This didn't feel empty. He felt strangely...what? He didn't know. It was weird, and he didn't know if he dare like it or not. He didn't want to get used to it, because he was sure it wouldn't happen again. 

Still, he took a moment to enjoy it, and was glad he did, because several minutes later there was a knock at his door, and before he could tell whoever to go away, Bob suddenly appeared leaning against the inside of the door. 

Or at least it smelled like Bob, and was dressed like him, in reptile patterned black leather pants (with matching boots) and a skin tight t-shit with a logo and album cover from the band Tool (he had a feeling Bob probably got a kick out of the dual meaning of that), but his face was more or less hidden by several corks hanging down from the wide brim of the hat he was wearing. "Howdy, mate," he said, and added, "See, I knocked first." 

Logan sighed, and set his book aside, sitting up. "Why are you wearing a Bruce hat?" 

"Ah, you recognized it," he replied, doffing it. Somehow, his hair remained perfect underneath, and when he tossed it across the room, it spun like a flying saucer, the corks flying out like stabilizers. "Far be it from me to replace Monty Python in your lexicon, but actually it's a swagman's hat. You had to wear them in the Outback to keep the buggery flies out of your face." 

Logan easily caught the hat, and stared at him in disbelief. "You're not telling me you actually wore somethin' like this, and not as a joke, are you?" 

Bob nodded. "Used to be a swagman. I used to be a ringer too, a guy who sheared sheep. I was really good, 'cause the sheep were never afraid of me." 

"I heard you have the same effect on bats." 

He smiled. "Ah, the fruit bats. Gotta love the fruit bats." 

Logan looked down at the hat, and then looked back at Bob, aware he was going to make him ask. The bastard. "Why the fuck have you brought me a swagman's hat?" 

Bob gave him his patented shit eating grin. Obviously he'd been waiting for him to ask. " 'Cause everyone needs a tacky souvenir, mate. Next time I'll bring you a stuffed 'roo." 

"My cup runneth over," he noted sarcastically, tossing the hat towards his dresser. It made a perfect ten point landing, and he wondered if its aerodynamic properties were one of the goofy hat's appeals. 

"Oh, hey, I should have known you'd own this CD," Bob said, looking up as if he could see the music. He then sang a bit. "Courage, it couldn't come at a worse time..." 

Logan got up and quickly turned off the stereo. 

"Do you have "Day For Night" ?" Bob wondered, done with the singing for now. "There's an overlooked masterpiece of the '90's. It's almost flawless, not a false note to be had, and maybe a dozen people have ever heard of it." 

"Yeah, that's pretty good," he replied, before he realized what he was saying. He then looked back at Bob and scowled, looking around for a shirt to put on. "What are you doing here? Is this a social call or somethin' ?" 

"No, although that'd be fun. And may I say, before we move on to the important shit, that I always knew you had pretty good taste under that hairy, hard exterior of yours. "Beowulf " even. The original's pretty dull, and got some of the details wrong, but that version's pretty good." 

He found a plain black t-shirt in his top drawer and pulled it on. "So you're saying that not only is it real, but you know what actually happened?" 

"Well - " 

"No, I don't wanna know," he interrupted, shaking his head. "So what disaster brings you here?" 

"How do you know it's not something good? Maybe I've decided to share one of my award winning trifles with all of you." 

Logan stared at him, waiting, crossing his arms over his chest. Award winning trifles? He wasn't even going to ask. 

Finally, Bob threw up his hands. "Okay, I owe you guys a trifle. I have a bit of a mutant problem, and wondered if you might give me a hand." 

"A mutant problem? How could you have a mutant problem?" Logan grabbed his book off the mattress and put it in the drawer of his nightstand, as he didn't want Bob to see him put it under the bed. 

"Well, I need to find one who may have wished a town - and everyone in it - out of existence. Think you can help me out here?" 

He waited for Bob to add "Kidding,", but he never did. 

Well, so much for the peace. 

** 

    The five of them - Scott, Logan, Jean, Ororo, and Bob - stood in the metal lined corridor outside of Cerebro, waiting for  Xavier. 

After Bob's little story about the disappearing town and populace of Maplewood, California, Xavier said he'd try and use the machine to track the mutant down. No one had heard of a mutant with reality warping powers, and Scott wondered if       it wasn't just one of Bob's family members. Bob said whomever they were, they weren't as powerful as him ("Left a lot of details behind." - What the hell was that supposed to mean?), and he admitted he hadn't completely ruled out a demon cause, but from his own investigation, that seemed more and more unlikely. 

Xavier was eager to help, as a mutant that dangerous shouldn't be running around without control of their powers... assuming the town's disappearance was an accident. The more frightening possibility was it was deliberate, and in that case they needed to find them as soon as possible. 

What the hell they were supposed to do about them was another problem. 

Bob was standing farthest from the door, and Logan was closest to him, on the left side of the hall.  Jean was farthest away from Bob, nearest Cerebro, and Scott was beside her, trying to act like some physical buffer between Bob and Jean, as he knew his powers were enough to give her a vague headache. But that wasn't quite what bothered him about Bob; everything bothered him about Bob. He couldn't narrow it down to just one thing. 

Which was true of Logan as well. The two of them were perfect for each other. 

But Jean leaned past him, looking at Logan, who was staring at the opposite wall like it had pissed him off somehow. "Scott showed me what happened in Tokyo," she said, her voice low, like this was a library and there was some unseen pressure to be as quiet as possible. As she leaned past him, her hair slid off her shoulders and hung down like a soft veil of scarlet silk. It reminded him of when he first met her; he thought she was so lovely she was obviously too beautiful for him. That feeling was starting to crawl slowly, inexorably back into his mind, burrowing into his brain like a tick beneath the skin. "Are you sure you're all right, Logan?" 

Logan looked at her, puzzled by the question. Maybe when you could take a fatal injury and get up each and every god damned time, 'all right' was just a theoretical concept. "I'm always all right," he pointed out with a shrug, acknowledging her question more than answering it. 

(In Tokyo, he had called her "Jeanie".  Scott called her that sometimes, but no one else did; it presumed a certain level of intimacy. Even Jean didn't like other people to call her that.) 

Jean looked dubious, concern in her clear hazel eyes. "You were shot in the face at nearly point blank range." 

That made Ororo's ghostly blue eyes widen, and she turned to Logan in obvious shock. "You were shot in the face?" 

Logan looked down as if embarrassed, shrugging one more time. "I've been shot in the face a lot. It's like gettin' shot anywhere else, 'cept you get a more direct taste of cordite, and the gunpowder sometimes burns your eyes. But it bounces off all the same." He knocked on his own forehead to illustrate the point. "Adamantium skull." 

Ororo just gasped, horrified, possibly that he could be so casual about it. But Bob actually laughed, and when they all looked at him, he said, "Mate, you raise the bar of macho behavior impossibly high, you know that?" 

Jean shook her head and looked at the sealed door of Cerebro, but he caught her slight, amused smile before she glanced away. 

"I bet you could take it too," Logan replied to Bob, both accusatory and dismissive. 

"What? And muss my hair?" Bob replied smiling, as smart ass and shallow as always. 

Ororo shook her head, clearly appalled. "No offense, Logan, but sometimes you're a very scary person." 

Scott almost agreed, but realized that could be taken as meaning he was afraid of him - he wasn't - so he didn't. 

Logan, for his part, just shrugged, as if he didn't know what to say about that or what he could do about it. 

"That's his great strength," Bob commented, still grinning like a used car salesman, but sounding serious. "If you know what he is and what he can do, maybe you'll be too scared to take him on." 

"You make me sound like an attack dog," Logan grumbled. 

"Well," Scott began, but Jean grabbed his arm, and gave it a hard squeeze. 

"Don't," she whispered savagely in his ear. 

But Logan looked sharply at them, as if he'd heard her, and guessed what he was about to say. Logan stared daggers at him, and Scott hoped he knew he was returning it. 

"Not my intention," Bob continued smoothly, ignoring the little drama going on around him. "I rather hope everyone knows my rep as the Drai'shajan - it usually saves some heartache. I don't like to hurt people." He paused briefly. "Most people. Usually." 

Scott was about to comment on that - Jean couldn't possibly care if he took on Bob; he knew she was as freaked out and dubious about him as he was - when he was silenced by the noise of Cerebro's door sliding open. They all turned as the Professor glided out in his wheelchair, a troubled look causing his brow to bunch, wrinkles to appear prominently in the corners of his sky blue eyes. 

"What happened?" Bob asked, before anyone else could. He had actually backed up a bit down the hall, as if trying to keep a specific number of feet away from Xavier. Maybe he was. 

"I may have found the mutant you were looking for," Xavier admitted. 

"But?" Bob asked. 

The Professor's lips thinned, and he looked almost pained as he admitted, "I think the problem is worse than we thought." 

Worse than a reality altering mutant? 

Scott almost didn't want to hear this. 

    4 

    It was a slightly blurred image taken from a distant security camera, but Heydon knew it was exactly the man he was after simply by the way he carried himself: the forward thrust of the shoulders, the lowered head, the deceptive masculine grace of his walk. Like a humanoid predator stalking prey through the asphalt jungle. 

He added the black and white still to the surface of his desk, comparing them to the other photos he had accumulated of his prey. 

The oldest was an incidental shot that dated back to 1972. A grainy black and white photograph from a Spanish newspaper, it was a grainy partial profile of him, partially obscured by a crowd and a parked car. Heydon had to laminate the photo several years ago, as the paper began to yellow and fall apart. 

The article was in Spanish, a language he could read but had no need to, as he knew the article well. It was an account of a fatal car crash between a tanker truck and a small car on a street in downtown Madrid. The truck burst almost instantly into flames on impact, killing the driver, and the small car was wedged hopelessly beneath its grill. The car's passenger had been killed, but the obviously injured driver was still alive and trapped behind the collapsed steering wheel as the flames of the truck began creeping forward, towards the car, and backwards, towards the truck's gas tank. Bystanders tried to help get the driver out of the car, but the heat of the flames (and the fear of explosion) was too intense, and most people simply waited helplessly for the fire brigade, or, more likely, the car to erupt in flames and explode. 

And that's when he showed up. 

Emerging from the crowd of gawking rubberneckers, he was described as "European", speaking fluent Spanish with a slight accent that was not quite American but assumed to be so. In spite of the growing flames and intense heat, he went ahead and wrenched the damaged door open, and pulled the driver to safety on the sidewalk, about a minute before the entire car went up, and three minutes before the fire brigade showed up. By the time the firemen showed up, the man was gone, and the paper seemed to find it fascinating that such a brave good Samaritan should disappear before he could take his due of praise. The photo - the only snap of the good Samaritan - was taken by a tourist on the scene. 

There had been a hunt for the good Samaritan for weeks after, even an offering of a reward from the grateful parents of the young woman driver. She, named Manuela de Jesus, not only thanked him, but became more and more convinced he hadn't been a person at all but her guardian angel. Perhaps it was the head injury she suffered, but she insisted the man had been cut by broken glass, burned by hot metal and flames, and yet never hurt at all. 

Heydon knew it wasn't coincidence he was vacationing in Ibiza at the time; he didn't believe in coincidences. He didn't know why this caught his curiosity, but it did. 

By the time he tracked down Manuela, she was in the grip of full religious mania - she had become a devout Catholic, and was studying to become a nun. She was convinced God had sent an emissary to save her, to help her turn her life around and give her a second chance to do good. 

It was hard for him not to laugh at her. He knew there was no god and no angels, not like the bullshit Bible would have people believe. She had obviously embellished her tale to fit her new religious fervor, but he knew several things: it had happened. A normal Human would have been turned away by the skin blistering heat, burned badly by touching the car.  
A demon, then? What would that have done to Manuela's religious conversion  if he told her she was rescued not by an angel but a devil, a demon that was supposed to be the epitome of evil? 

It was years before he found another glimpse of the mystery man, and years before he discovered he was neither an angel or a demon, but a simple freak of nature. 

Security and surveillance photos surfaced in Japan : 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981. He was working for some crime family, a security guard of some sort, but not well. Eventually most of the family was slaughtered, as was their rival, all in a single night, but a little investigation proved the man had done it himself: he killed them all. The reason seemed to be tied to the daughter of the crime family, whose murder was the first of the very long and bloody night, and was,investigation proved, his wife. That surprised Heydon, because the man didn't seem to have a life;  he lived as a phantom, a member of the living dead who seemed to drift like a dandelion fluff on the wind and never settle anywhere. Perhaps the death of the woman proved why he never did: trouble swirled around the man like an aura, and he seemed to be swathed in blood. 

Heydon could sympathize. 

The fact that he was a mutant was a surprise, but not an unwelcome one. In fact, if he wasn't a demon, it might make things easier...if he was a good candidate. At the time he didn't think much of it, as he was happy in his new place. 

The man was very hard to find. He was always hard to find. There were just bits and pieces, scattered all over the globe: a poor security camera shot, placing him in Heathrow airport; another placing him on a street corner outside a bank in Toronto; a shadowy shot that could be him on a pier in Hong Kong; a quick bit of footage putting him outside an embassy in Jerusalem; a slightly better shot of him outside a nightclub in Los Angeles; another blurry shot of him in San Salvador; him barely seen in the background crowd of a tourist snapshot taken in Moscow's Red Square. No matter where he showed up, there was trouble near or around him; he was trouble, in humanoid form. 

Heydon decided it was not an accident; he was not a globetrotter simply because he was running from grief and a probable criminal record. He was surely a black ops agent of some sort or another; his killing of the crime families indicated he was probably an assassin (who else but a professional could kill so many armed men - and gangsters at that - in a span of hours?), but an assassin who would stop and pull a woman out of a burning car? Curious. People didn't work that way.  
So he was working against his will, or he honestly thought, killer or not, he was working for the good guys. And maybe he was - how was Heydon to know? Not everything was black and white; sometimes you needed the bad guys put down, and sometimes you needed a person who could ignore the rules and go all the way if necessary. He had no doubt the man, whom he had taken to calling Nomad for his own amusement, was a very good killer. A death artist, if you would. 

He didn't find it curious that no one else had sussed him yet. He was a professional shadow - he was not supposed to be noticed. If he was, it was a trap, a certainty of demise. He was, in a way, a sort of twin to Heydon, a person living an existence quite similar to his, except he was not the type to pull some stupid bitch out of a burning car. 

It was a recent photograph from a security camera in New York that made him realize why he'd made a minor hobby of gathering intell on Nomad. 

He put them together, the laminated photo from the Spanish newspaper, and the still from Statue of Liberty's security camera, and felt that warmth of certainty and victory spread throughout his body. 

Nomad all right. Nomad, same as always. 

Thirty years. Thirty goddamn years. 

Not a new wrinkle, not a blemish or a scar, not even a grey hair. He was like an insect in translucent amber, untouched by the ravages of time, and the damage from the things he had done. 

That's when he discovered the true nature of his mutation: he thought he was simply a tough guy, a strong man with skin like leather and internal organs like stone. But he was code named Wolverine, and his main mutation was akin to immortality. Manuela, the poor deluded head case, had it completely wrong. He was hurt; he was hurt frequently and often. But it just healed over. Skin grew to take the place of burnt off flesh, bridged gaps when gashes appeared, blood started to clot the second it was exposed to air. Yet it wasn't just injuries his body could heal. It was the incidentals, the tiny paper cuts of time that no one noticed and yet killed them all one second at a time, that he could heal as well. 

He could be very well as close to immortal as a Human could be. Trying to trace him back in time - with only the name Logan to go on - proved impossible. He could be sixty years old; he could be six hundred years old. He left no records in his wake, no traces, nothing that someone could latch onto to reel him in. He was not only a professional, but a man who lived in fear that his status as an outsider, a true mutant freak, would be discovered and ruin him, or ruin what little he had in this world. 

Heydon had decide he was a hundred years old. An arbitrary number, but nice and round. Assuming he was thirty thirty years ago, when he pulled de Jesus from the car, he would be sixty now, but something about the man and the way he slipped through life and barely left a ripple suggested he was much older. Older, jaded, weary, cynical, and yet very gifted. And amazingly forgiving, seeing as he still took time out to do what he must have thought as heroic things. 

That was where Heydon parted company with Nomad nee Wolverine - he was not forgiving. Not of any of this, this so called society, these dumb ass people in it. 

And this was where he knew it had been serendipity that he had this hobby of tracing Nomad. Because no one had ever been a more perfect specimen for him, the most perfect prey. 

That body couldn't be damaged for long, even by his old enemy time. 

Heydon couldn't wait until he had it for himself. 

    5 

    Jean had known the Professor long enough to read the worry in his eyes. 

She knew something had gone wrong in Cerebro even before he confirmed it. "I think I found the girl. Her name is Miranda, and I doubt she's more than sixteen. She's in Los Angeles right now...I believe." 

"You believe?" Scott repeated. He was surprised at the way he was so tentative; that wasn't like the Professor. 

Xavier grimaced, and admitted, "I got a sense of tremendous power from the girl, but I also had the sense of...another. But not quite someone else, but-" 

"Something else?" Bob suggested. 

Xavier hesitated before he nodded. "That's probably closest. I'm afraid I didn't have her for very long. I had just focused on her when...something cut me out." 

"What?" Jean asked, startled. Xavier was probably the most powerful telepath on the planet. What could interfere with him? Aside from Magneto's helmet, or that demon... 

Demon? 

"You were blocked?" Bob interjected. 

Xavier nodded again, this time with more confidence. "It was like a wall slammed down. I was kicked out." 

"You're sure she was Human?" Bob asked. It seemed like a stupid question, but Jean had the feeling he was asking only for confirmation. 

Xavier nodded once more, more relaxed, but his obvious discomfort at being thwarted lingered in the lines and crevices of his patrician face. "I am sure she was. I'm not so sure about the other." 

"I wonder what's going on there," Bob said, thinking aloud. "If she's being helped or used by a demon." 

"Think the power's all hers?" Logan wondered. She wasn't sure if he was asking Bob, Xavier, or both. 

Scott scoffed, mostly because it seemed so silly. "Are you saying she's possessed? Do we need an exorcist?" 

Bob actually shrugged with his hands. "I wish I could I use that doo hickey of yours." He must have meant Cerebro. 

"Why can't you?" Storm asked. 

"I'll make it explode. I mean, it'd be pretty, but I wouldn't recommend it." 

Scott stared at him, the rigid set of his shoulders saying without words that he didn't believe Bob. Or at least didn't like him, which was not a shock. Scott just refused to like anyone who had anything to do with Logan, although Bob was so deliberately curious and oblique she could understand and sympathize with the distrust of Bob. What she couldn't quite bear was Scott's continued dislike of Logan (and vice versa). It seemed childish and petty, jealous and pointless, two men in an endless pissing contest for domination. She'd thought Scott was above such things, and as for Logan, he didn't seem like the insecure type. 

Bob glanced at Scott, a faint smile gracing his lips, and she had a feeling Bob had read all his thoughts and knew exactly what he had thought of him, and perversely found it funny. 

It wasn't the first time that it occurred to Jean that Bob would have nothing to do with them if it wasn't for Logan. But that begged the question why he had anything to do with Logan. She had a feeling the answer was either so complex or so simple that none of them could ever guess it, not even Logan. 

"That explains why I was havin' a hard time pinning it down," Bob said, getting on to the topic at hand, his supernaturally bright gaze scudding back to Xavier. "What we've got is a mutant - demon tag team." 

"Or a mutant - demon hybrid?" Logan suggested. 

Bob shrugged. "Maybe. Won't know until I meet her. Can we get a picture, Chuck?" 

She didn't know what was more surprising: the fact that he was so familiar with Xavier, or the fact that the Professor didn't seem to notice or mind. 

"I can't - " Xavier began, but Bob didn't let him finish. 

"Send it to him," he said, pointing to Logan. 

Logan looked at Bob with a raised eyebrow, not surprised but definitely ticked off. "Why do I always draw the lucky straw?" 

" 'Cause I know I won't kill you,"  he replied, as if Logan should have known that. He shrugged again, as if he agreed he should have known that. 

Xavier sent the picture of Miranda to all of them, save for Bob for obvious reasons. Miranda looked like an average teenage girl - gawky, a little plump, her hair a frizzy nimbus of mud brown surrounding her round and somewhat sad face, her eyes so brown they were black, and yet something about them was too bright and too hard, sharp and wild and yet supremely calculated. She had a feeling she was a bright girl, but also perhaps a little cruel, a little quick tempered and savage.  
(Well, she'd made an entire town disappear - how could she not be?) 

"No glimpse of the presence?" Bob wondered. 

Xavier shook his head. "No. Just a very brief sense before I was cut off." 

"Damn," Bob said,  glancing down at the floor, lost in thought. "Was the presence in her mind or outside it?" 

Xavier shook his head. "It happened too fast. I couldn't tell." 

"I should have never left L.A. ," Bob mused, glancing up at them. "If she makes that disappear, people are gonna notice pretty fast." 

"Would it be so bad?" Logan replied sarcastically. 

Bob shot him a sharp glance. "Yes, because I have some kids out there. Nobody is going to even try and wish any of my family out of existence." 

"You say it like that could actually happen," he said, raising an eyebrow at him. It sounded like Logan wished it could happen. (But considering how many 'kids' Bob seemed to have, she supposed she couldn't blame him.) 

Bob smiled then, a toothy grin with an edge to it. "Course it couldn't, but no one even thinks about it. I'm a mean old poppa bear." 

"Don't you mean 'roo?" Logan wondered. 

That made Bob laugh, and she got the idea it was a private joke. She was pretty sure she didn't want to know what that was about. 

Scott leaned back, and whispered to her, "Are they both completely nuts?" 

Before she could tell him to behave, Logan fixed him with a hard stare. "Don't you wish, 'Clops." 

Scott leaned back and matched his glare, tense across the shoulders. Did he forget how good Logan's hearing was? His range was beyond what she could test. It then occurred to her Scott might have known and said it anyways, and there was a thought she really didn't care for. 


	3. Part 3

"Now now, gents," Bob said kindly, like a bartender trying defuse a potential fight. "Save that sexual tension for another time." 

"What?" Scott asked, horrified. 

Logan started to give Bob an evil look, but then he just shook his head and looked away before anyone could see him grin. He was accustomed to Bob's outrageousness by now. 

"Where's Marie?" Bob asked, as if he hadn't made a tasteless joke. 

"Upstairs," Storm responded warily. Although she wasn't a psychic, she seemed to physically shy away from Bob along with the rest of them (except for Logan, of course, but it was difficult to imagine someone who could shrug off a gunshot to the face as being physically intimidated by anyone). "She's helping Bobby set up Kitty's birthday party." 

"Why do you want Rogue?" Scott asked warily. 

"Think about it, mate. One touch of Miranda and she can wish her powers didn't exist. Then we could all go home and have a beer." 

"Would that work?" Storm asked, intrigued. 

"She's a kid," Scott countered protectively. "She's been too involved in dangerous things as it is." 

"And let's face it, you can make Miranda's powers disappear," Logan interjected. She wasn't sure if he was protecting Rogue as well, or simply making a point of fact. Logan waved a hand in front of his own face, and said, "No powers, remember?" 

It sounded like Logan was referring to something specific, but it was obviously only something that involved Logan and Bob. 

But the curious demon grinned sheepishly, as if caught in a lie. "Well, mate, I didn't only mean her powers." 

Xavier guessed first. "The demon." 

Bob nodded. "It's probable I can affect it, but what if I can't? That does happen." 

"And what if the demon is the true source of power?" Jean interjected, following the line of  thought. "If you can't affect it -" 

"We're all screwed," Bob finished, nodding again. "Because she can wish you all out of existence, or just your powers, and where will you be?" 

"She could wish you out then." Scott said. 

But the demonically charming Bob shook his head. "I'm a different case, mate." 

"A uni-dimensional being with pan-dimensional qualities," Logan said, as if quoting someone else. 

"What the hell does that mean?" Scott asked churlishly. She knew he'd left out some of what had happened in Japan, but since everyone needed their privacy she didn't press him about it, or force her way past his deliberate mental blocks. But she had a feeling whatever it was, Scott was unhappy with Logan. She almost got the sense he'd disappointed him somehow. 

The Professor looked at Bob with intense curiosity, and asked, "Is that what you are?" 

Bob nodded again. "Can't really explain it. But let's just say removing me from the fabric of this dimension will take more power than she probably has." 

"Too bad,"Scott muttered, looking at her for agreement. But she gave him a small 'not now' sort of frown. No, she didn't trust Bob - he was far too secretive and too glib, and he seemed to have an attachment to Logan that was questionable at best, but most of all he seemed to be a man of dubious morals and stupendous power, two things that did not go well together - but she wasn't ready to have him dead. She couldn't deny he had risked his safety at least in trying to do the right thing. Now and then. 

"Yeah, I know, bit of a pisser, isn't it?" Bob agreed, with surprisingly good humor. That was another thing about him: he made everything a joke, but she wasn't sure that wasn't just a veil for his hostility. "What we have to do is put together some kind of game plan. I'd rather know more about what we're facing before we take it head on, but I'd hate for Miranda to wish another place away. Why don't Logan, Jean, and I zip on over to Lalaland for some recon, and when we have a better idea of what we're going against - or we get the idea Miranda and her demon familiar are going to make a move - and then we'll bring you over?" Bob said, looking between Scott and Storm. "I can tell you then if I think Marie should be in on this or not. I still say, as long as this isn't a psychic demon, she could be our ace in the hole." 

"Hey, wait a minute," Scott objected. "Who put you in charge of this?" 

"This is vergin' on my territory, in more ways than one," Bob replied smoothly, like he expected him to say that. 

"Why Jean?" Scott continued, and that made her scowl at him. He probably didn't mean to say it like she had no reason for going,  but that's how it came out. 

"Telekinetic. You know how fucking cool that is?" Bob replied, grinning. 

Although he had probably said that for her benefit, she looked away to hide her smile. Yeah, it was pretty fucking cool at times. 

And she hadn't used her powers more defensively than the last time she was out with Bob, looking for Scott. She wasn't sure he hadn't pushed her in some fashion, but she'd felt good letting out all that energy, mastering so much of her power. 

Against an explosion, against a collapsing building, against an army. She was terrified, and yet...what a rush. 

Part of her was chomping at the bit to go off with Bob. And the other half thought she shouldn't dare. 

What was that prayer, that one about not being led into temptation? That was Bob's biggest danger - he was temptation. He just encouraged you to let go. Logan was pretty much immune to it - he was generally full on, he held nothing back, whether anyone liked it or not - but no one else was. It was, in equal measure, his danger and his appeal. Logan and Bob both. 

No wonder they paired up. In all respects, they seemed to be an unbeatable team. 

"I still don't see why we all shouldn't go right now," Scott said, and she noticed how defensive his posture was, how combative. What had happened in Japan? He'd seemed unsettled since then. 

"Because, if there's some major fuck up and we underestimated any demonic friends or mutant relatives she may have, we might need the cavalry to swoop in and save our asses, General," Bob said, in a jovial manner that had a definite sharp edge to it. The General was not delivered with sarcasm, but was clearly meant to be so. 

She noticed Scott's hands clench into fists at his side, and just as he was about to tell Bob what he go do with himself, the Professor interjected, "I think that's a wise idea." 

Scott frowned at Xavier, but didn't contradict him. He wouldn't. 

"I need to go get my coat," Logan said, ignoring all the melodrama going on around him. 

"I should probably change," she admitted. Technically she was fine, wearing a demure black dress and low heels, but she knew if they were going to be walking around L.A. and possibly fighting, she should at least be wearing flats. 

Bob nodded. "I'll meet you in Logan's room in five minutes." 

Oh, why did they have to meet in Logan's room? But she didn't say that. Logan headed down the hall, not even bothering to wait for the end of the conversation, and with an apologetic glance at Scott and Storm, she went after him. Logan must have known, as he held the elevator for her. 

It felt so strange to be alone in a small, enclosed space with Logan. She knew there were several unresolved issues between them, including that kiss she had done her best to forget (but what a kiss...), and this was probably not for the best considering the mood Scott was in. She stayed on the opposite side of the small elevator from him, but for his part Logan looked even more uncomfortable than her. 

"What happened in Japan?" She asked, to fill the awkward silence. "I mean, I know about the attack on Nariko, but I have a feeling he's leaving something out." 

Logan glanced up at her, lips thinning, and he looked away, as if there was something fascinating on the far wall. He shook his head, and she thought he wasn't going to say anything, but finally he said, "He seems to think you're unhappy." 

"Me? Why?" 

He scoffed and shrugged, as the elevator came to a stop. "Don't ask me, darlin', I ain't engaged to ya." 

She suddenly wondered if Scott had asked something similar; he sounded as if he was weary of discussing someone else's problems. "Did he blame you?" She asked, surprised at the thought. 

The door slid open behind her, revealing the polished halls of the school, and he waited for her to go with obvious impatience. But she wasn't going anywhere until he answered the question. 

Logan realized that, and his green eyes were icy as he glared at her. "He blames me for everything, Jean." 

She wanted to deny that, but she knew that was more or less true. She wanted to explain Scott's behavior to him, excuse it, but what excuse was adequate enough?  "He doesn't understand you," she finally said, aware how lame that sounded as it escaped from her lips. 

Logan made that derisive noise again, the shake of his head so quick it was violent and could have been excused as a tic. "And what the fuck does that mean, Jean? If we sat down and had a male bonding moment, he'd stop treating me like an interloper? Like a party crasher who refuses to leave?" 

She knew he was right, and yet she felt compelled to defend him. "You never gave him a chance, Logan." 

"He never gave me one," he shot back. "He doesn't like the idea of competition, so he figured he'd be as bitchy as he could in hopes of running me out." 

"He doesn't - " he gave her a look as brutal as a punch, and couldn't bring herself to lie and say he didn't want him gone. Of course he did, and they all knew it. Except the kids, of course; they tried to keep such personal issues between themselves. She frowned at him, abhorring playing psychologist and family counselor."There is no competition. You're a part of the team, and that's that." 

"Oh really? Don't I get a vote in that? And it's rude to eavesdrop and you know it, Rogue," he suddenly snapped, looking over her shoulder. 

She instantly turned and saw no one, but then Marie peeked warily around the corner. "I was just passing - " 

He fixed her with a hard stare, and Jean joined in. 

Under the dual assault, Marie finally rolled her hazel eyes and threw up her hands in defeat. "All right, all right. But did ya expect me to walk in on your argument?" 

"We are not arguing," Jean insisted, and knew she was the worst god damn liar in this place. 

Marie fixed her gaze on Logan, her face taking on a petulant expression. "Damn your ears." 

"Nose, actually," he replied, not at all offended by her remarkably bloodless comment. They had that kind of relationship where she could insult him and he could insult her; his saving her life a couple of times had bonded them, much to Scott's continued horror. But at least her crush had transferred (mostly) over to Bobby. "Ain't you supposed to be plannin' a party or somethin'?" 

"We're done. You know how hard it is to plan anything for someone who becomes massless? On top of being really uptight." 

"Kitty's cool," Logan replied, much to Jean's shock. She'd never gotten the impression that he thought much of the kids. He didn't hate them, but he barely seemed to notice they were around. And it was funny he had picked Kitty to comment on. She was not one of the girls who had a crush on him, she seemed firmly in the intimidation camp, but while he was gone Kitty had admitted to her that she really admired him and hoped he'd teach her to 'really' fight. She was a slight girl, and her power wasn't exactly one she considered 'defensive'. ( "All I can do is get away, and I want to do more than that. I mean, if I have to.") That was just another thing that annoyed Scott; the kids seemed to think Logan was the 'protector', and as long as he was here, they were okay. They used to think of them all as protectors. "I mean, she's not as tightly wound as Scott." 

Marie scoffed. "Yeah, well, who is..." she trailed off, eyes widening in horror as Jean stared at her. "I, umm...I think Bobby's looking for me." She made several vague gestures behind her, horror stricken, and quickly retreated down the hall. 

Jean turned her hard gaze on Logan, who wasn't quite smirking, but damn close. "I'm sorry. Should I have said 'restrained'?" 

"This is childish, Logan. I expect better of you." 

He raised an eyebrow at that, and not for the first time she wondered if being able to move his eyebrows like that was a secondary mutant power. "Oh, do you? I thought I was the resident animal." 

"Don't even try that on me. You are not a barbarian brought in from the wilderness, although god knows sometimes you and Scott both act like orangutans around each other. It takes two to make a petty pissing contest, and I would appreciate it if at least one of you acted like the grown men you're supposed to be." She turned and stalked out of the elevator, done with this conversation. She was starting to get really angry - pulse pounding in the temples, dangerous angry - and she didn't want that to happen. It was tempting to lose control, but it was never good. "I'll be ready in three minutes." 

She thought Logan might make some snarky comment, but as she stormed away, he wisely kept his mouth shut. 

See? She knew he wasn't dumb. 

    6 

    Scott had a feeling he was being called on the carpet as he followed the Professor to the 'war' room. Not in current use, and barely repaired from the time Bob was in here last, fighting that floating demon thing and that acid barfing demon who left a big hole in the floor. 

As soon as the door closed behind him, Xavier swung his wheelchair around, and fixed him with frosty look. "What happened in Japan?" 

He sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. "I thought Jean shared that with you." 

"She did. I was wondering what it is you left out." 

He knew this was coming. Before he left for Japan, Xavier had asked him to try and make some peace with Logan the next time he saw him. When he pointed out they had absolutely nothing in common, the Professor said they would always have one thing in common if nothing else: their status as mutants. He felt there would always be common ground there. "I tried to make a connection with him, I really did," he said, annoyed at Logan anew for making him defensive. "But he doesn't trust anyone, and he's as bad tempered as a rabid weasel stuck in a threshing machine." 

One of Xavier's pale eyebrows arched at the analogy, but he didn't comment on it. "It  takes time, Scott. No one can change the habits of a lifetime overnight." 

"He's not going to change. Why should he? I'm sorry, Professor, but for such a low class guy he's a complete snob. He thinks he's better than us." 

Xavier actually considered that for a moment, and Scott thought he'd finally gotten through to him. But then he got a strangely blank look on his face that Scott always knew was bad news, and his voice lowered, which, opposite other people, was another bad sign. "Did you know that low class man is fluent in seventeen languages? And that's only the ones that he agreed to be tested for - it's quite probable he speaks most if not all of the world's most common languages. I've never met anyone with such a natural proficiency for it. And where - and why - he learned them is just as mysterious to him as to the rest of us. I don't expect him to completely trust anyone, possibly ever. You know what's been done to him, Scott, and even if he does find some answers I'm not sure they'll make him much happier." 

"Okay, so he was tortured," he admitted, throwing up his hands. He knew this sounded callous, but how long could you milk a thing? They weren't even responsible for it. "I'm sorry, but that doesn't give him the right to treat us all like shit." 

"He was mutilated, and they took away his memories to cover their crime. I might have a hard time getting over that myself." 

"He doesn't even want to be here." 

"Logan doesn't know what he wants, besides vengeance. And let's face it, he is never going to be the most...ingratiating man.  
But he comes back, Scott. He's trying harder than you realize. I hope you're not projecting your distrust of Bob onto Logan." 

He grimaced, putting his hands into the pockets of his pants. "Are you going to tell me you trust him too?" 

Xavier gave him a ghost of a smile. "He's never given us a reason not to trust him. I admit he's an...odd man, but I don't believe his intentions are anything but good." 

There was a pause before "man" too, and he could guess why. "So, we're taking him on faith too?" 

"He saved your life." 

There it was, just like that. Scott looked away, feeling a muscle in his jaw twitch as he swallowed hard. The very idea ate at him like acid. "Maybe not," he replied weakly, staring down at the steel plated floor. 

He didn't look up, but he could feel Xavier's withering stare like a pair of hands pressing against his back. "Scott," he said in that warning voice, like he was a stern father warning his wayward son. But Xavier was pretty much like a father to him, wasn't he? 

"Logan's bad enough," he said, finally looking back at him. "Do we have to tolerate his weirdo friends too?" 

Xavier sighed, and said, not without humor, "Yes." 

Scott rolled his eyes, glad his visor prevented Xavier from seeing it. "Fine." 

He turned around to go, but then the Professor said, "You can tell a lot about a person by actions without forethought, instinctive reactions. What was Logan's first reaction when you were attacked in Japan?" 

Scott thought about it, and then paused as he remembered, scowling at Xavier's little observation. 

"He protected the girl," Xavier said, since Scott was in no hurry to answer. "Before you judge him too harshly, think about that." 

He wanted to point out it was probably a fluke, one of the aberrant things that happened occasionally, a statistical blip, but he knew better than to argue with him further. 

Xavier had his opinion, and he had his. 

** 

    Logan sat on the edge of his bed, room door wide open, feeling like a kid nervous about a dentist appointment. (Had he ever been to the dentist?) 

Jean was pretty pissed off. He seemed to push her buttons pretty easily, didn't he? Well, at least she didn't throw him through a wall. 

"It's awful, isn't it?" Bob said suddenly, appearing in the doorway. 

He wished he was shocked, but he wasn't; now he was just annoyed. "Don't start." He warned. 

But since when did Bob listen to anyone else? He grinned, and came inside, although he remained out of Logan's reach. "It's awful when not only you're caught in the middle, but when you become a symbol. It's bloody awful being the representative of somethin', trust me." 

He was not asking; he'd given up on asking Bob about anything. "Why did you want her to come along?" He asked instead. "To piss off Scott?" 

"Oh, like that's hard," he replied. Fair enough. "No, mate, she's cool. Or at least when she really lets go, her powers are. Telekinetics are fucking impressive, as long as they have their powers under control, and aren't trying to blow up your head." 

"That happen a lot?" 

"More than I'd rather admit." 

Logan decided he was telling the truth, but you could never know for sure with Bob. Reality was a malleable concept to him. 

Suddenly serious, Bob leaned against the far wall, arms crossed over his chest, and added, "She holds back too much. When she really lets go, she can kick some ass. And around you, she really wants to let go." 

That could be interpreted in any number of ways. "What do you mean?" 

Bob suddenly held a finger up to his lips, and a few seconds later Jean came in, having traded in her dress and heels for blue jeans, sneakers, and a green t-shirt with matching windbreaker. Her thick red hair was held back in a high ponytail too, which he found mildly disappointing, as he preferred her with her hair loose. Pulled back tight, it sometimes made the planes of her face look too severe. 

Logan stood up, and she looked between him and Bob, a small line of annoyance arcing between her brows. "I hope I'm not late." Didn't sound like she meant it. 

"No worries," Bob replied breezily, straightening up. "Now, I hate to pull rank, so I'm not gonna, but I think you should follow my lead until we know what we're dealing with. Unless Logan gets some crazy urge and runs off on his own." 

Logan shot him a harsh glance, but in the end he could only shrug. Yeah, well, maybe it was a fair cop. 

Jean simply nodded,looking weary. "Fine." 

Bob looked at her curiously, and said in a low voice he almost didn't hear, "It's okay, darlin'. Really." 

She seemed to relax, shoulders loosening a bit, losing some tension, and Logan figured that was a mild push. But why? And about what, exactly? What was 'okay'? 

Before he could ask, Bob held up a hand towards him in the universal stop gesture, and said simply, "You'll feel nothing." 

And just like that, they were suddenly in Los Angeles. 

Logan didn't quite stumble, just looked around fast enough to almost lose his balance. They were in an alley somewhere, near an industrial dumpster overflowing with noisome trash that some homeless guys were using as a urinal. As he shook his head to try and banish the smell, Jean looked around in surprise, ponytail slapping her shoulder, and asked, "Does this ever cease to be weird?" 

He assumed she was asking him. "Not really." 

Bob had already walked up to the mouth of the alley, looking out at the river of cars streaming past them. L. A. didn't have pedestrians really, just people who did business on the street, homeless people, and people whose cars had broken down. 

Bob turned back to look at them, with a pair of mirrored sunglasses on. How he materialized sunglasses Logan didn't even want to know. "My targeting gets better and better. We're a bit west of Sunset, and, if I'm right, straight in wish girl's path here." 

"And then what?" Logan wondered. 

Bob thought about that for a moment, looked back down the road, and then said, "Well, that's a very good question." 

Logan sighed and rubbed his eyes. If he popped his claws now, he could gouge them out. Would that be such a bad thing, really? 

"Look, you're the professional heroes," Bob pointed out. "I'm just a dabbler." 

"Who regularly averts apocalypses,"  Logan countered wearily. 

"It's a hobby." 

"We're insane," Jean exclaimed, throwing up her hands as if in surrender. "We are all insane." 

"That would explain a lot," Logan agreed. 

"Okay, so, this is reconnaissance, " Bob said, like they'd been debating that. "So what's the best way to reconnoiter in an urban situation?" 

Logan glanced up to realize Bob - and now Jean - were staring at him. "What? You're asking me?" 

Bob looked at him like he was making a joke. "No. I'm askin' the invisible trash elf over your shoulder. Yes, you." 

"Why me?" 

Bob shrugged with his hands as Jean looked between them, fascinated with the exchange. "Ain't that your area, mate?" 

He stared at him in disbelief. "Why is that my fucking area?" 

Bob just looked vaguely amused. "Well, let's see, there was that time in Vancouver when - " 

"Fine," he interrupted crossly. He wasn't sure which Vancouver incident Bob was going to refer to, but he didn't really want this coming up around Jean. 

"What happened in Vancouver?" She asked curiously. 

But he wasn't going to answer that. "Later," he lied, and came to the mouth of the alley to look past Bob. 

This was part of the busy downtown Hollywood corridor: shops that verged from quaint ("Helen's Candle Emporium") to commercial ("Starbucks") to kinky ("Maximum Bondage Leather Goods") lined both sides of the narrow, well traveled street. The only pedestrians were the occasional shoppers leaving or going to stores (and only in L.A. would you see a woman in a 'Hilda of the S.S.' black leather get up leading a young shirtless guy down the street by the chains through his pierced nipples) (Well, maybe you'd see it in San Francisco...), and there were so many young (or youngish) looking women it was hard to scour every face before they disappeared from view. 

He wished Xavier had gotten a whiff of this Miranda; he'd have been able to just catch her by scent, and need not bother with sight. 

"All right. Bob, why don't you zap across the street, and go to the end. Jean, stay here in the middle. I'll take a topside point at the head of the street." 

"What do you mean topside?" Jean asked, but not before he had moved to the side wall of the building on their left side and sprung his claws with a familiar noise and a familiar pain. 

"I could zap you - " Bob began, but Logan had already dug his claws into the brick, placed his feet flat against the wall, and scrambled up to the roof. "- or you could do that." He finished coolly. 

He looked down at them, glad to be looking into shadows and not into the harsh hard light of a Southern California afternoon. Jean gazed up at him, her expression somewhere between amazement and sarcasm. "You've done this a lot." Not a question. 

He retracted his claws and nodded. 

"It's a gift, let me tell you," Bob interjected. "You have to meet a certain balance between your legs and the claws, or the claws cut straight through. I learned that the hard way on Dis. It's an art, mate - I'm impressed." 

Logan didn't know what to say to that, so he didn't say anything. 

"How do we stay in touch?" Jean wondered. "If someone sees her, how do we contact each other?" 

"Bob, you zap in and tell us; Jean, send it to me telepathically, Bob, keep an eye out for a signal from me; and if I see her first, don't worry, you'll know." 

"No attack," Bob reminded him. "She could wipe even you out, Logan." 

"Would that be so bad?" He replied sarcastically. 

"Yes," Jean said, perfectly serious. 

He looked down at her, and felt a sudden pang of sorrow, although he didn't know if it was for her, himself, or both of them. "Everyone look sharp," he said, then turned away and started moving across the roof, towards the roofs of the other buildings that lined this side of the street. Save for two alleys that were cut through,  probably as short cuts for deliveries at the rear, the buildings were all uniform and cheek by jowl, and he could traverse them quite easily. And no matter that it was an extremely, glaringly bright day - no one looked up and noticed him even once. 

He kneeled down at the corner of a building at the head of the block, trying to carefully scan the faces of all the female walkers, and even the drivers of expensive cars - because, let's face it, a teenager of any sort wouldn't wish they had a beater car. 

Logan could feel the sun on the back of his neck, sweat starting to ooze from his forehead, and he suddenly wished Bob had materialized him some sunglasses too. 

    6 

    Miranda  wasn't sure when she realized that things were actually going very wrong, only that it dawned on her as a sort of obvious afterthought. 

She has wished herself to a more interesting place - L.A. - but while that wasn't hard, the pain remained in her head, humming like a live wire. She tried to wish it away, but it hadn't worked. Everything else she wished away went without a trace, so why didn't that work? 

She was starting to think there was more going on than she realized. But she wasn't sure if she should be upset or not. 

She wasn't sure where she was, exactly. She'd been to L.A. once, and that was when she was five years old. It had seemed like a golden city then, full of impossible glamor and glitz, a sunny place where everything was glamorous and you could buy all sorts of neat things. But right now it seemed dirty and tacky, just another city with a tendency to try and gild its crumbling buildings with neon and murals, signs and sigils of a different, phony age. But gilded shit was still shit, just worth more on the open market. 

She sat in an ice cream parlor, in one of the little red tables by the front window, all by herself as she lugubriously spooned up globs of melting chocolate ice cream and let it fall back with soft plops into the plastic coated paper cup containing a small moat of melted mocha almond fudge, mixed in with whipped cream and strawberry sauce. This was her favorite sundae, not allowed to her since her mother put them both on that stupid diet two months ago, but all that was happening had robbed her of most of the simple joy of even this. 

The quiet, save for the small mechanical noises of the freezers kicking on and the regular hum of the air conditioner, was starting to get to her. She'd wished everyone away as soon as the pimply teen behind the counter got her her ice cream. She enjoyed it for about four minutes and a third of the sundae, and then it all seemed to pall. She wished she knew why, so she could make it stop. 

She was vaguely aware that she had certain impulses that seemed very foreign and strange: it was almost like they weren't coming from her at all. Which was crazy, but wasn't all of this fucking nuts? 

She had made an entire town disappear. She had simply shown up in Los Angeles, without having to grab a car or a bus. 

She wished suddenly that she could talk to someone about this. But who? Her mother was gone, and would have dismissed her anyways.  She'd never been close to her father, or any other member of her small and dysfunctional family. 

As she stared out the window at the dull, pear shaped people walking by, she suddenly wondered if it could be so easy.  
"I wish I had a friend," she muttered, chuckling to herself. 

It was that easy. Without any sense of displacement, there was a teenage girl sitting in the (formerly) empty red vinyl chair across from her. She was pretty in an ordinary sort of way,  her hazel eyes bright and her mouth crimson, her nose slightly pug and her oval face framed by a close cropped halo of wavy brownish blonde hair. She was wearing a multicolored floral print halter top, and her manicured fingernails were painted a deep blue. She had not been Miranda's idea of a friend (although honestly she'd had no idea in mind), and something seemed off about her, although she couldn't say what. 

"Are you real?" She asked, not sure what to make of the stranger in the chair before her. 

The girl laughed, and folded her pale hands together on the red lacquered table. "Of course I am, Miranda." 

"How do you - " 

"I'm you're friend, remember?" 

Miranda studied the girl warily. This still didn't seem right, but her head hurt less, and she felt slightly less dizzy. "What's your name?" 

"Cressa." 

Now there was a phony, Hollywood sounding name if she had ever heard one. Even stupider than her name. "I'm sorry." 

Cressa cackled, in a manner that wasn't forced yet still seemed so. "Oh, come on, what's a shitty name?" She looked around the empty ice cream parlor, a moue of disappointment curving her lips. "What's say we get out of here and go have some fun?" 

Miranda knew things were even wronger now than they had been before. It was like the world had been kicked loose from its axis, and was now spinning out of control, headed straight for the heart of the sun. But if everything was crazy, or at least going that way, where was the harm in going with it? 

What else could she do? 

Miranda sat back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest, and continued to eye her 'friend' warily, even as she replied, "Sure, why not?" 

** 

    According to the locator spell, Logan a/k/a Wolverine a/k/a Nomad had come closer to his home turf, and was in Los Angeles. But of course things weren't that simple. 

The Drai'shajan was near him too.  



	4. Part 4

That was actually kind of funny. Heydon wondered if the old Drai wanted him too, but since he was beyond the realm of time, probably not. But the Drai had an affinity for oddballs, collecting weirdos like it was a hobby, something to while away the dull eons. It was amazing they'd never run across each other. 

Of course, the fact that Heydon actively avoided him had probably helped a great deal. 

Not that he had anything to fear from the Drai. He was very hard to kill, and the Drai was no threat to him, as he was originally from a Hell dimension so foul the Drai and its ilk had given up on it a long time ago. 

But it was the friends of the Drai that might cause him some problems, so he'd have to do this carefully. And there was the small possibility that Logan would put up a bigger fight than he would anticipate. 

Again, no problem. But he was a violent man, and he was bound to try something. He wasn't psychically inclined, though,so he foresaw no problems there - he'd just try and make it as unpleasant as possible for as long as he lasted, and he was sure Logan was one of the most unpleasant Humans around. But then again, it might be fun. 

He sat back, and considered his next move. 

Maybe he should grab Logan as soon as the opportunity presented itself, and get him as far from the Drai'shajan as possible. If it all worked out well, by the time the Drai caught up, Logan would be completely gone, and the vessel would be totally his. 

And the Drai would just have to live with it. 

** 

    Jean wondered if she should have mentioned she didn't think she was a strong enough telepath to send a message to Logan at the head of the block. 

Well, in theory, she could. But there were several problems: first of which was finding Logan's minds among all these others. Not hard, because his mind was very peculiar: it was like a broken mirror with several shards glued back in to place, but shards from different mirrors, so they didn't quite fit, and the distortions could be as fantastic as they were horrifying. It was a very dark place, though, a minefield of shadows with claws even sharper than his, and she really didn't want to have prolonged contact with it. Or any, really, if she could avoid it. 

And the only person she had ever contacted telepathically over a distance was the Professor (which didn't exactly count - he was such a powerful telepath that required almost no effort on her part) and Scott. But she'd had a long link with Scott, and that probably didn't count either. His mind was a remarkably trouble free place (well, there were a couple of things, but she found his mind significantly less darker than hers, for the most part), and she had no fear of what lurked in its shadows. Whereas she had no link with Logan, and feared just about everything that lurked in his mind: it was, much like Logan himself, even more deadly than it seemed. 

But a part of her was sort of fascinated with it, wasn't she? It was the Doctor in her, she supposed. She wondered how he managed to get through every day life - how he managed to remain sane, in fact - with a mind so devastatingly ravaged. If they found him living as a homeless man on the streets of Calgary, terrified and mistrustful of people and hooked on drugs, she wouldn't have been the least bit surprised. Yet somehow he managed to keep relatively functional, and although he seemed to possess an almost pathological avoidance of people, Alex had proved that Rogue was not the first troubled person he had helped. 

For her, it posed an interesting question - could his healing abilities extend to the psyche? Was it somehow helping him hold it together? Bridging the gaps in his mind and the psychic wounds, making some latticework approaching normalcy, enough so he could function in spite of having almost no memories beyond nightmarish visions of violation and pain? 

She would have loved to have studied that. But Logan had probably been studied enough, and really she didn't want to dig into his mind. A surface glimpse had made her sick; she didn't want to know what would happen to her if she really started going deep. 

Still, he was a fascinating paradox, from more than one angle. And she had to stop thinking of him that way, as obviously Scott was starting to pick up on her fascination. But how did one become so brutal and yet noble, sane and yet shattered at the very same time? There was a major paper in there somewhere. 

And she was a little disappointed in herself for thinking of him as a research paper. How unfair was that? 

The sunlight flashing off the passing  windshields and bodies of cars made her eyes water, and she wished she had remembered to bring some sunglasses. The smell of exhaust and garbage was starting to get to her too, and  she didn't know if it or the recent proximity of Bob was more responsible for her budding headache. 

She decided not to hide in the alley anymore - it's not like the girl would know her on sight - and moved out onto the sidewalk, trying hard to look casual, like she was waiting for someone but not urgently so. She didn't want to seem like she was on a stakeout. 

She did receive a few glances, and figured it was probably due to the fact that she was the only person wearing a coat on this stiflingly hot day. As she slipped off her windbreaker, a young guy who looked like every other car mechanic she had ever seen stopped, and threw her an oily smile he must have thought as charming. " Hey, what -" 

"Move on," she said flatly, staring him straight in his small, pale eyes. She could make it a telepathic command if she had to. 

Thankfully, her look and tone of voice seemed to do it. "Moving on," he agreed, and did just that. If only all men were so easily discouraged. 

She just draped the jacket over her shoulder, holding on to it by her index finger slid through the inside label, when she heard a strange noise behind her, and turned to see Logan in the alley, coming right towards her. "I saw her," he said by way of explanation, as she glanced up at the roof of the used bookstore beside them. The noise she heard must have been him hitting the ground - how high was that building? He jumped from the roof? 

Then again, his bones didn't break. It was one of the things his adamantium was good for. But he landed on his feet? He must have the balance of a cat. "She's on the next block over," he continued, not even acknowledging her surprise over his agility. 

"Good eye," Bob said, suddenly appearing at her right. 

Even though she sensed the psychic pressure of him, she still jumped. "Don't do that," she snapped. 

Bob gave her a sympathetic grimace that she couldn't help but doubt the sincerity of. "Sorry darlin'. Where is she, Logan?"  
"She just came out of a Baskin Robbins , but not alone." 

"Demon?" Bob asked. 

Logan shrugged, wiping sweat off his forehead with arm. Well, he was wearing a leather jacket. "She looked Human, but I smelled somethin' funny, and I bet it was her. She also seemed to shimmer a bit at the edges." 

"Shimmer?" Jean repeated. She wasn't even going to ask how Logan could have smelled something funny in the crazy quilt of weird scents that made up what passed for Los Angeles air. It was so laden with effluvia she was pretty sure she could scoop a sample of into a cup and take it back to Westchester with her. 

Logan shrugged again, but this time it was a 'damned if I know' sort of gesture. "Like she wasn't completely there. Like a bad hologram." 

"Hmm." Bob made that sound thoughtful. "Like a projection - " 

It was then that the most curious feeling passed over her like a wave of psychic force, strong enough to make her stagger. 

Logan grabbed her arm and steadied her, as a wide eyed Bob asked, "You felt that?" Actually it wasn't a question at all. 

She nodded, resting against Logan's solid chest for a moment, enjoying his strength more than she knew she should have. But he didn't seem to mind. "What the hell was that?" She wondered, hoping Bob would know. 

"What just happened?" Logan asked. She didn't know if he'd felt it, or was simply reacting to their reactions. 

"Fuck if I know," Bob admitted. "It felt like a massive psychic shift." 

"What the hell is that?" Logan asked, before she could. She stopped leaning against him, and he gently released her arm. It was funny how you could almost feel the adamantium beneath his flesh; he seemed more solid than he had a right to be. More like a wall than a human, unyielding where he should have been soft. It was both sad and strangely alluring at the very same time. Like him, more or less. 

"A sudden and obviously supernatural shift in the basic psychic mood of a group." 

"I didn't know groups had psychic moods," Jean admitted, although she had some idea of what he was getting at. 

"It's like..." Logan began hesitantly. "Like when a crowd starts turnin' ugly?" 

Bob nodded, and gave him a proud smile, like he had passed a test. "Yeah. And who knew you were sensitive to such a thing? But maybe you learned from experience." 

That made Logan grimace in distaste, and she felt rather bad for him (what exactly was Bob getting at?), when they all heard the noise of glass breaking, horns blaring, and voices raised to angry shouts on the next block. 

They all exchanged knowing, startled looks, and they darted as a group to the head of the street. 

As they looked around the corner, she unconsciously reached out and grabbed Logan's upper arm, like she would Scott's if he was here. Not so much for support or courage, just for the knowledge that he was there, no matter what. 

It was a street not unlike the one behind them, a dull ribbon of grey bracketed by cracked sidewalks and tiny shops standing hip to hip, like commuters crammed onto rush hour subway cars, but the traffic had stopped flowing through due to a two car collision only a few meters away from them. Someone's sporty red Corvette had met violently with someone's imposing black Mercedes, and the two were now crunched together at the front fenders, creating a v shape that clogged the street as effectively as a barricade. 

The two male drivers were arguing with each other in the middle of the street, and now other drivers who were being delayed because of them were getting out of their cars to argue with them. It looked like several arguments were breaking out independently on the sidewalks as well. 

(And no matter how much Jean looked, she couldn't see Miranda. Maybe she and her friend had ducked back inside the ice cream parlor.) 

"Cute. I bet this is a distraction." Bob said. 

Logan nodded in agreement. "The girls are gone. Think they knew they got pegged?" 

Bob shrugged this time. "Maybe. If the demon was psychic sensitive, she may have sensed my proximity, and decided that discretion was the better part of valor and beat cheeks. Or got Miranda to wish them elsewhere. Whichever; same difference." 

Bob walked out towards the men arguing in the street, pulling off his sunglasses, and snapped, "Hey!" 

When they looked at him sharply, clearly annoyed, he said, "Back to normal." 

The two men blinked rapidly, and then went right back to arguing, as if there had been no interruption at all. "I guess she didn't get them," Bob admitted sheepishly. He then looked directly at her, his eyes as strangely hypnotic as a cobra, and asked, "Jean, you think you can help me get this crowd under control before they start rioting? Maybe a telepathic suggestion of calm?" 

She wasn't sure she could, but she nodded, consenting to give it a try. 

As Bob caught as many people as he could and put them to right, she tried hard to project peaceful and sedating thoughts, so hopefully fist fights wouldn't erupt before Bob could correct both sides of the street. Logan, meanwhile, had checked in the ice cream shop, coming out with a rather troubled look on his face (did she want to know what was in there?), and then stood near it, seemingly sniffing the air and looking around, as if trying to determine their direction. 

One man unwisely smashed into Logan's shoulder, and she was afraid their might be a fight that that poor man had no hope of winning. But while Logan was clearly annoyed, he ignored him, aware that the guy wasn't in his right mind, and Jean gave him a telekinetic shove down the pavement, just to save his life in case Logan's patience wore thin. 

Finally Bob seemed to fix it all, calming everyone down, and just in time too. There was a spark of a headache starting to glow behind her eyes, and she was sweaty and exhausted, as if she had been engaging in physical labor and not psychic work. 

Perhaps because of a Bob suggestion, or just because they were back to normal, no one seemed to give them a second look as they walked on passed, like they were nothing more than large stones in the river of pedestrians. They gathered around Logan near the ice cream shop, and she couldn't help but glance in the shop windows as Bob asked, "Can you trace them?" 

"If I can find 'em again, yeah, but they must have zapped out, 'cause their trail stops dead here." 

The shop was empty. A hot L.A. day, and no one was in there, not even an employee behind the glass topped freezers, although some of the chairs around the circular tables were pushed out, as if people had been there. Once. It was almost more chilling to see the nothingness than it would have been to see bodies. What had happened to all the people? 

"What is it?" Bob asked, and she turned to see he was addressing Logan. 

Logan was still frowning, a crease appearing between his brows, and he was still clearly troubled by something. "Unless it's the demon, there's somethin' wrong with the girl." 

"In what way?" Bob slipped his sunglasses back on, and she wished he had a pair for her. 

"She's ill. I smelled dying cells in there. It was too current to be anyone else." 

"Dying cells?" Jean repeated. "You can smell that?" 

He shrugged, embarrassed. "Illness has a smell." 

Actually, several did. She knew from medical school that sometimes certain smells could be associated with specific illnesses - sweetness with diabetes, for example. But by the time you could detect a scent in a person's breath or sweat or even urine, the illness was usually progressed. Still, Logan had a sense of smell more acute than a bloodhound's, and there was no telling what he could smell, and at what stage. 

"What did the demon smell like?" Bob asked, and suddenly held something out towards her. They were, she saw, mirrored sunglasses. Oh, cute. 

"Ammonia. Somethin' sour, like curled milk or spoiled beer." 

Jean was careful only to touch the sunglasses and not Bob, and gave him a nod of thanks as she slipped them on and considered the vague diagnosis of dying cells. "Do you mean damaged tissue, Logan, or cancer? Can you tell?" 

He considered that a moment, as Bob held out a pair of sunglasses for him. Logan waved them away. "Cancer usually has a more corrosive smell," he said, and she wished she knew what the hell that meant. But Logan had a vocabulary all his own, one of tastes and smells that no other (or at least few other) could identify with or interpret. It was, in a way, its own form of synesthesia "I don't think so. But I can't rule it out 'til I meet her. She's not in top shape, though." 

Bob nodded thoughtfully (where did those sunglasses go?), and said, "I think Miranda has even more problems than we thought. I'll take us back to the mansion and we can talk about it." 

"We need to find her," Logan pointed out. 

"I know. Before it's too late." 

And Bob zapped them back to the mansion before she could ask what that meant, but that might have been for the best. 

    7 

    They were gathered in Xavier's study, Xavier behind his impressive mahogany desk, Jean curled up with a cup of tea at one end of the leather couch, Scott sitting close to her, with Bob standing near the chair across the room, in which Storm sat, looking placid and slightly above it all. Logan stood near the door, leaning against the wall, because he didn't feel much like sitting. He was tired, but not quite that tired, not yet. 

"I think we're dealing with a Zayrith demon, which knocks Rogue out of her ace in the hole position," Bob announced, as soon as Jean had caught up the others on what had happened. 

"A psychic demon?" Xavier asked. The light spilling through the window behind him was much softer than it had been in Los Angeles, muted as if through a filter of near translucent clouds. It was simply kinder here, as if the sun simply glanced, while in L. A. it glared. 

Bob nodded, the look on his face deeply regretful. "Zayriths are nasty and opportunistic; they have some psychic powers, but mostly they find other psychic beings to enhance and exploit." 

"So this Zayrith is responsible for Miranda's powers?" Scott asked, somewhat dubiously. 

"Not completely. I'm sure Miranda is a psychic mutant of some sort, maybe even a telekinetic of some power, but certainly the nesting Zayrith has probably channeled it through itself and made her powers almost unfathomable potent." 

"Nesting?" Logan wondered, frowning at his choice of words. That sounded really, really bad. 

"Yeah. In this dimensions, Zayriths have some impressive mental powers but are physically...well, let's just say pathetic." 

"What do they look like?" Even as he asked it, Logan felt he'd regret it. 

"Kinda like snails without shells. Thin, long, grey snails, with little ant legs." 

Storm made a noise of disgust, and both Scott and Jean grimaced. Although Bob looked sympathetic, neither he nor Xavier or Logan flinched, and Logan thought darkly, 'Takes more than that to gross us old guys out'. 

Not for the first time, he wondered how old he was. Some days he felt exactly a thousand years old, like some sort of living fossil whose stubborn body refused to quit. Or, turning to a more poetic turn of phrase, maybe death itself had simply forsaken him for greener (deader) pastures. 

"So, anyways," Bob went on, after expressions of disgust were out of the way. "If they want to stay alive in this dimension and have some level of functioning, they need to find a psychic person to act as host and help them metamorphose into a more functional body." 

"Whoa, wait a minute," Scott said, shaking his head as if he didn't understand, or didn't want to understand. "You're going to have to explain it in simpler terms for those of us not versed on demon habits." 

"Okay. They need to find a person with psychic energy, although they don't like telepaths so much, maybe because they don't like the chatter. Anyways, once they find a suitable host, they slip in, usually through the ear canal - " 

"They infest the body?" Jean exclaimed, sounding and looking appalled. She seemed to have captured the general mood of the room quite well. "Like a parasite?" 

"Most psychic demons are parasites," Bob told her, as if that was common knowledge. "They're basically all brain and almost no body. There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part, demons can be broken down into two groups: massive body and/or physical power, equals no or negligible psychic powers. Slight body, physical powers, and/or lack of completely corporeal form, equals powerful or overwhelming psychic powers." 

"So why do you have a body?" Scott asked. 

Logan scowled, trying to cover the fact that he was thinking exactly that. 

Bob grinned, and then said, "Go on, Logan, say it. I know you're dying to." 

Suddenly everyone in the room was looking at him, and he knew exactly what smart ass Bob was referring to - the second thought that had crossed his mind, answering his own (and Scott's) question. Bastard. "Gods don't count," Logan snapped, calling his bluff. 

"Gods?" Storm repeated, staring at Bob like he had suddenly grown an extra head. (Always a possibility with him.) 

"You have to be joking," Scott said, frowning at the both of them. 

But Bob, still grinning, went right on with his story, as usual completely glossing over the god concept like it was too absurd to even respond to. But by now they both knew there was no other explanation for him, not to mention his supposed friendship with Ganesha. "Okay, so the Zayrith infests a likely host, usually without their knowledge - " 

"You're a god?" Scott interrupted, disbelief evident on his Ken doll placid face. 

Bob's grin took on a hard edge, like his humor about it all was wearing thin. "One person's god is another person's demon," he replied cryptically, and then went back to his point. "And then the Zayrith twists the psychic power of the host. Not only to keep it from realizing it's there, but to help it come to fruition." 

"We're supposed to believe you're a god?" Scott said, absolutely unwilling to let this go. 

"And fruition is..?" Logan asked, ignoring him. 

"Well, basically, it's a psychic induced tran-substantiation." 

"What?" Jean asked, staring hard at Bob like he was doing that on purpose. He probably was. 

"It reconfigures the host psychic energies enough to literally make itself real - a real body - using the energy and some of the cells of the host. The problem is, it kills the hosts while doing it. In fact, part of its reconstruction of neural passageways in the host can act not unlike a brain tumor, which is why what Logan said troubles me. The Zayrith is at least advanced enough to be causing some brain damage, no matter how minor, to Miranda, and now that's it using her abilities to project itself - and I assume the girl Logan saw with her was just a psychic projection of the form the demon intends to physically create eventually - it means we're down to time here. Maybe because she's a mutant, she's burning through her powers fast." 

"So it's the demon doing these things, not the girl?" Storm asked. 

"It's facilitating the girl, and maybe influencing her, but it can't completely override her will. At least, not yet." 

"Can we get this thing out of her and save her?" Jean wondered. 

"It's going to be progressively harder the stronger it gets. I can't really get it - as you know, I'd hurt Miranda as much as the demon - but once it manifests in an outward physical form I could take it down no problem." 

"But by that time, the girl would be dead," Logan pointed out. 

Bob nodded. "The drawback in the plan." 

"Are you saying we actually need an exorcist?" Scott asked, shocked that his sarcastic suggestion might actually prove to be the answer. 

"No. They're just scam artists. Seriously, like any of that "oh, holy salt shaker" stuff would work on any but the lamest  demon. What I need to do is figure out a way to draw the Zayrith out of Miranda before the metamorphosis is complete." 

"I still don't get how anything could use another to transform itself," Storm admitted, still trying to puzzle it out. 

"Look at it this way. It's a fundamental principal of physics that energy can't be created or destroyed, just transformed., channeled, or, to some degree, changed. The basis for the belief in reincarnation, I believe. So what the Zayrith does is take some energy - Miranda  - and changes it to a more amenable form  - something for itself." 

"Can we lure it out somehow?" Scott asked. 

"Can we make Miranda an unsuitable host?" Logan asked. 

Bob thought about it, making appropriate faces of doubt."I'll call Ammy, see if she knows of any spells I can throw at a Zayrith." 

"Spells now?" Scott repeated, exasperated. 

Everyone ignored him. "I thought she was on vacation and threatened you with frogifying if you bugged her," Logan said, remembering Amaranth's threats before Bob teleported him out of his house and zapped him straight to Tokyo. 

"Frogify?"Jean asked. 

"Aww, she was just tetchy," he claimed, and then, grinning slyly, told Jean, "Frogify is to turn into a frog. It's not fun." 

"You're claiming she can turn people into frogs?" Scott said, moving into a sort of steady state dubiousness where he didn't quite believe anything anyone said, but was too tired to offer up anything else. 

"She turned me into a newt once. I got better." 

Logan recognized that as a line from "Monty Python and The Holy Grail", but judging from the looks everyone was giving him, no one else did. 

That seemed to amuse Bob, who gave him a knowing wink as he pulled out his cellphone. "I'll go give her a jingle. You got any reality alterers enrolled, Chuck? Shapeshifters? Anyone with the ability to manipulate time?" 

"We're not bringing students into this," Scott insisted vehemently. 

Logan exchanged a glance with Xavier, his ice blue eyes both resolute and emotionless at the same time, and Xavier said, "Tanith," just as Logan said, "Zero." 

Bob looked between them curiously. "Tanith Zero?" 

"Tanith McEwan, actually," Xavier explained. "She likes to refer to herself as Zero, a shortened form of Absolute Zero. Her powers allows her to suspend molecular motion in a limited area, nearly stopping it completely." 

"Like absolute zero,"Bob said, nodding as he got it. "How limited an area?" 

"We've tested it out to about ten feet around her. She can only hold it for a limited amount of time, because it's physically draining for her." 

"How precise is it? Can she use it surgically?" 

"I've worked with her a bit about usin' it as a weapon," Logan told him, shifting his weight against the wall to his other shoulder. Weariness was settling on him like a lead shroud, and he had no idea why, unless it was some kind of teleportation lag. Or just being around Scott. "How surgical are we talkin' about?" 

"It can be lethal when used on a person," Jean hastily pointed out. "I've worked with her too, and suspending molecular motion means suspending many basic bodily functions, including circulation and respiration." 

"As well as the oxygen molecules in the air," Bob said, but in a way that suggested he found that fascinating. 

"No kids in this," Scott insisted, looking dour and ticked off. "Getting Rogue into this was bad enough." 

"Tanith's seventeen," Logan countered. "I think she's old enough to decide for herself." 

"Wow, I barely remember being seventeen,"Bob admitted, sounding bemused. "I think I got thrown in the dock back in England for stealing a bottle of whiskey then." 

Logan didn't know which was worse: Bob lying about that, or Bob telling the truth. 

Before Scott could make some smart ass comment, Bob said, "It'll probably take us an hour to get our shit together, so why don't you catch some zees, Logan? Don't worry, we won't leave without you: your muscles and your fantabulous nose are always needed." 

He sighed through his nose, glaring at Bob. Just announce his weariness to the room; terrific. Bob was certainly a thoughtful demi - god."I don't need any sleep. I'm good." 

"When was the last time you slept?" Bob asked, looking at him curiously. But the bastard was struggling to hide a smirk as Logan tried and failed to come up with a time. "See? When you don't know, it's been too long. Now go, shoo, you're making me tired just hanging around." 

"I don't need sleep." 

"And I'm a cheese doodle. Would you just piss off already?" 

Logan glared at Bob, aware it did absolutely fuck all, but he couldn't stop himself either. "You should really keep other people's thoughts to yourself," he groused, turning and leaving the study. 

"Now where's the fun in that?" Bob replied as he left. 

He just knew he was going to say that. 

** 

    He felt warm flesh, like silk, gliding across his, and realized he had his face buried in hair as soft as velvet. 

Her hair; her scent. Mariko. 

Even as he felt a sickening twinge in his gut - he would swear his heart - realizing he was dreaming about her (and he knew he was dreaming: Mariko appeared nowhere else), it didn't stop him from moving through the motions of the dream, brushing his lips across her cheek, down to her slender neck. 

Logan could feel her arms wrapped around him, one across his waist, another reaching up and holding  on to his shoulder. He felt one of her legs wrap around his, pulling him down onto her, and he remembered how she liked to cling to him tightly, like she was afraid he might suddenly leave. Knowing him, maybe she was. 

He could taste her skin, the saline of her sweat, and he closed his eyes, feeling her arch against him, her warm hand moving from his shoulder to the nape of his neck. This was too much. It was bad enough that he didn't quite remember her, and that when he did he felt a deep shock of guilt and sorrow, so brutal he wanted to instantly forget again; but to have a memory like this (if it was), making love to her, it was just too much. It exacerbated his usual duality to the nth degree: he wanted to wake up now; he never wanted to wake up. 

She tangled her hand in his hair, as familiar a sensation as their bodies meeting belly to belly, and he sighed her name, kissing her throat, feeling her frenetic pulse beneath his lips. The scent of her skin was warm and clean, almost like rain and sand, and he knew it; it was familiar, even though he would swear he had never smelled it before. He felt this great swell of lust and love for her, so overwhelming it seemed foreign - he couldn't believe he'd ever felt that way about anyone. How stupid was he to ever leave himself so open, so vulnerable to attack and loss? 

(Wasn't the first time - certainly wasn't the last.) 

He felt her kiss his ear, her teeth gently nip the lobe, and then she whispered, her breath a hot caress against his skin, "You killed me." 

Logan jolted awake, desire and terror mixing uneasily in his stomach, leaving a sour taste in his mouth. He sat up, dry washing his face, finding sweat on his brow and his hands shaking. Guilt and slow horror washed away all the lingering lust. God, he couldn't even have a normal erotic dream; they all had to turn into nightmares. 

He got up and walked to the bathroom, glancing at the clock on his dresser as he passed it - he'd been asleep for forty five minutes. Shit, he must have been tired to sleep that hard. 

Even as he splashed water on his face, rubbing it into his face and hair, he thought he could still taste her, and his hands were still shaking. Yes, he failed her, and her death was his fault, but he felt something like ice in the pit of his stomach, like it was even worse than his mind would allow him to remember. That he may as well have injected the poison in her himself. Of course he didn't, he couldn't...but would he ever really know for sure? 

All he knew was Mariko's blood was on his hands. He just wasn't sure to what extent. 

He had rubbed warm water onto the back of his neck, watched the water drip down from his face and make ripples on the surface of the water in the sink, and he realized something was very wrong here. 

Everything seemed, on the surface, fine: the bathroom looked the same as always,  it smelled the same, he was still wearing the same t - shirt, jeans, and socks he had (barely) stripped down to to sleep, and when he looked into the mirror the same strange man looked back at him, red capillaries branching off from green irises healing and disappearing as he watched, fading back to perfect white, beads of water suspended in his facial hair like tiny diamonds. Sometimes, if he stared at himself long enough, he almost looked familiar to himself; and sometimes he could see the skin thinned around his eyes, allowing him to imagine the leering metal skull and its blank sockets beneath the flesh. 


	5. Part 5

But all of that was correct. What was wrong was the noise - or, the lack of it.  
It was quiet in his room, but only in a relative sense. He couldn't help but hear all the incidental noises of living in a large place with other people - footsteps in the hall, murmured voices, water down the pipes, a distant door closing, the electronic stutter of radios and televisions and video games - but he usually shoved that aside unconsciously, so it didn't drive him completely crazy. 

Yet there was nothing. It was like Xavier had evacuated the school again, but he knew he hadn't. 

It was then he knew he was being watched, or something worse; he sensed a presence all around him. A demonic presence. 

He spun on his heels, and saw, sitting in a chair in his bedroom, a rather unremarkable man. Dressed in a brown suit with a crisp white shirt and dark blue tie. His oily blond hair was slicked back in a fifties sitcom sort of way, exposing a bland, pushed in face dominated by a square jaw and small grey eyes that seemed just a little too far apart. He had a lit cigarette in his hand, but Logan couldn't smell it. 

Him he could smell. He may have looked Human, but he was about as Human as Bob, only not as pleasant smelling. This guy smelled like mold, like damp newspaper and stale air. 

"Who the fuck are you?" He demanded. 

The man gave him a small smile with lips so pale and thin they were almost non - existent. "I the fuck am Heydon. Or at least that's what I've taken to calling myself. Human tongues are so inexact." 

"You after Bob?" 

"Bob? Is that what the Drai'shajan calls himself? Oh, how delightfully benign and ironic. I bet he gets a kick out of that. No, my dear Nomad, you're the one I want." 

"Nomad?" He repeated, puzzled, moving into the bedroom. Or at least he tried - as soon as he entered the doorway he froze, as he seemed to come up against an invisible force field he could not push through. 

"My nickname for you. And no, your claws won't help. Do you prefer Logan or Wolverine?" 

Logan glared at him, but Heydon remained as casual and blase as a man at a cocktail party. He was powerful, that was obvious, but no match for Bob. Who was a match for Bob? "I prefer you to fuck off and die." That only made Heydon chuckle, and take a leisurely drag from his illusory cigarette. "What the hell do you want with me?" 

"Oh, just your body. It's not actually personal, it's just that your mutation suits my needs so well." 

"Your needs? What, is this some kind of come on?" He was trying to be flippant, but he was starting to feel a nascent sense of panic, especially because he couldn't move, and he knew, in spite of his surroundings, he was no longer in the mansion.  
While he was sleeping he was somehow kidnapped, and he never even realized it. 

"No. Your body, in fact, now belongs to me. But I'm willing to let you come along for the ride, while you last, if you behave yourself. Personally I can't believe you never had more fun with your abilities. You were always such a serious, intense person." 

"You're lying." Did this man know him? He had to be making it up. He was a demon, and a liar. 

(He couldn't feel his body at all, could he? He couldn't move because he wasn't really here...his mind; this was his mind...or Heydon's mind...) 

Heydon gave him a slow, malevolent smile that seemed to ooze equal parts arrogance and evil. He was in the driver's seat, and they both knew it. "No, my dear mutie, but I know you wish I was." 

Logan felt his heart start to triphammer, and he had to swallow back his rising sense of panic and fear, and the fruitless rage that it spawned. Not again, please god not again! 

He'd been captured, and now he was trapped. But this time, he had no idea what his demonic captor wanted from him. 

    8 

    Jean wondered, not for the first time, how she could reconcile all this with the world she knew. 

She was a Doctor; she liked the solace of the stable, bedrock rules of science, even if the biology of mutants got wacky and kind of out there at times. Like Scott and his optic ray eyes, Kitty and her disappearing mass, Logan and his miraculous healing abilities. But now she was just supposed to accept and live with the fact that Bob's granddaughter (or was it great granddaughter? Did it matter?) was a practicing witch - not a Wicca, an actual spellcasting, 'frogifying' witch. 

Considering everything she had seen Bob do, that shouldn't have been too hard. But then she was supposed to accept him as some sort of god, wasn't she? 

Even though it was clearly insane, she was still leaning towards her irrational Loki theory. 

But she had seen Bob 'throw' a spell or two, like making the jet seemingly disappear, and had basically come to accept the fact that there was almost nothing he could do that would shock her anymore. 

(Maybe Bacchus...he had no powers that she could think of, but he was a 'fun' god, wasn't he?) 

While Bob was on the phone to Amaranth, she and Ororo had gone to see Tanith, a/k/a Zero, who was working alone in one of the student science labs. 

It was typical for Tanith to be alone. She'd been at the school for two years, ever since Xavier had picked up on her strange gift for molecular 'freezing', but before her identification as a mutant she had already lived her life as a loner, accustomed to being and depending on herself for nearly everything. 

She was a child of two working class parents in Glasgow, Scotland, but her father died in a car crash when she was five, and her mother soon sunk into alcoholism. Eventually, her mother suffered an accident in her job at an industrial laundry that left her functionally deaf, and Tanith was left to take care of her mother and herself as best she could. When she found out about the Xavier school,she was eager to leave her hardscrabble and taxing existence, but was guilt ridden about leaving her mother by herself. Xavier paid for live in help for Tanith's mother - a nurse whose job it was to not only look after her disabled mother but help her get off the alcohol - and she had been at the school ever since. 

Her mother thought Tanith had won a scholarship to an 'exclusive' school, completely unaware of her daughter's mutant status, and Tanith seemed in no hurry to tell her. 

They didn't force the children to 'come out', so it was completely up to her whether she told anyone or not. Although she felt occasionally guilty about leaving her mother, it was perfunctory guilt, one born of a feeling of obligation and routine. She had admitted to her once she had almost no feelings about her mother at all except for a sense of duty; when Tanith and her mother switched roles, when she became in essence her mother's mother, their relationship was damaged severely. 

So was Tanith's childhood. Jean could still remember meeting her, her first day in the school - she was the most responsible, dour, and 'adult' fifteen year old she had ever met. In a way, it had been terribly sad. 

It took almost a year before she started to lighten up, before she started to relax. She remembered hearing her finally laugh and thinking it was a minor miracle. 

Tanith still kept her distance from most of the others, although most of the kids liked her and were willing to include her if she ever wanted to join them. If Jean and the others didn't go out of their way to stop her, she had a tendency to act motherly towards the newer, younger students, which was fine, but they didn't want Tanith to start acting overly responsible, as that was a trap she had a knack for falling into. Luckily, she seemed to have gotten past that for the most part, although she was still a very rigorous student, which explained why she was in the lab, doing an extra credit assignment. She wanted to be a physicist, and Jean could think of no one more qualified. 

Tanith was a pretty girl, if tending to the slightly severe, as she had an angular, raw boned face, and china blue eyes so pale they tended towards colorlessness. She was petite but solidly built,and her long, tawny colored curly hair was held back in a tight braid that the curls always escaped from by the end of the day, like prisoners who hated confinement. As she once rarely joked, she could stop all molecular motion, but not her hair. 

They did their best to explain the situation to her, without having to explain that demons were real and Bob, the occasional guest lecturer, might actually be a god of some sort. There was such a thing as asking too much of a person. It wasn't that easy, but it helped that Bob had been in to explain parallel universes, and she was always an attentive student who loved his lectures. Jean just stuck to saying they were battling a being from a parallel universe who was slowly but surely killing this girl, and Bob called it a 'demon' as that was what he jokingly referred to all beings from other universes as (okay, a big lie, but Bob was always joking, so it wasn't that big of a stretch). 

She seemed intrigued and eager to help if she could, even though they warned her of the potential perils. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to talk her out of it," Bob said, and they turned to see him leaning against the doorjamb. Jean knew he must have just arrived, as she had just started feeling the psychic pressure of his proximity. 

Tanith seemed surprised, and then glanced at him shyly, trying not to smile. "Hello Mister Oberon," she said, looking down at the polished wood floor. Her Scottish accent had an upwards inflection, so matter what she said it almost always sounded like a question. 

"Now, I told you it's Bob," he corrected her gently, then said, "You're Absolute Zero? Blimey, I should have guessed. My favorite student." 

He threw her a teasing wink and a matching smile, and Tanith pretended to busy herself with taking off her lab coat and stowing it under the table. But Jean had seen her smile as she turned away, saw the deep ruddy flush of her pale skin, starting from her cheeks and creeping all the way up to her hairline. 

Oh no. She had a crush on Bob? 

Tanith had never had a date, to her knowledge. She didn't even have a best friend. Jean suspected she was probably homosexual and wasn't willing to come out with that either, even among her fellow mutants (although she knew of a few students who were quite open about their alternative sexuality. Most weren't quite as aggressively 'flaming' as Billy, who was actually a gifted telepath, but he had some anger issues as well), but she had never seen her exhibit signs of a crush. 

But why not? 

Most of the girls - and Billy - had a crush on a Logan. It was probably an attraction to the tortured rebel archetype more than Logan himself (although that day he taught some of the older kids hand to hand combat moves in the back garden, and took off his shirt because he was too hot, the windows on the upper levels nearly shattered from the weight of all the girls pressing against them to stare at him. Of course, she'd be lying if she didn't admit she found it momentarily distracting...), but Tanith had seemed immune, although (again, like most of the kids) she liked him, albeit with a little fearful awe mixed in. Liking Logan always seemed to have the fearful awe attached, and the kids didn't even know half his story - all they knew was he was a grumpy 'claw guy' who was seemingly unkillable, afraid of absolutely nothing, and really, really liked to fight. And was very, very good at it. As Bobby had once quipped, "Major General Badass." 

But Bob was a close second in the crush sweepstakes, for different reasons. He had those incredible but masculine good looks, and he was (seemingly) warm and open and funny with the kids, oozing charm so thick she was always surprised he didn't leave a trail. And some of the girls seemed to really like his Australian accent. As Helga had said, "Everyone likes Bob." 

Well, not really. She still wasn't sure what his angle was. 

Nevertheless, she had never met any student that disliked Bob. Most inquired eagerly about when he might be coming back. Yet Tanith had never been one of them. 

Then again, wasn't she naturally quite and reserved? And wasn't she fascinated by quantum physics? 

Jean suddenly knew this had been a very bad idea. 

"If all things work well, I may not need you to do anything," Bob told Tanith, as if that was a comfort. "But if there's one thing I've learned, it's things don't have a tendency to go-" 

Bob suddenly paused, a strange look on his face, and he looked back down the hall. " - well." 

"What is it?" Ororo asked, sounding a little tense. Having Bob around could do that to a person. 

Bob looked around, and while she had no idea what he was looking for, she had the feeling he wasn't just searching with his eyes. It took him another few moments to look back at them, a troubled expression on his face. "I thought I sensed an incursion there. It's gone now." 

"An incursion?" Tanith asked, amazingly not sounding surprised at all. But then again, she was a naturally stoic type. Underneath her protective lab coat, she was wearing jeans, a blue sweater, and hiking boots - perfect fighting gear, although not necessarily in L.A. 

"A...huh. Hard to explain. I'm gonna go get the big guy - I'll meet you guys in Chuck's office, okay?" 

"The big guy?" Jean repeated, then guessed. "You mean Logan?" Now she was getting nervous. What had Bob picked up if he suddenly wanted Logan back now? "I'll come with you," she said, giving Ororo a knowing glance. She nodded, and Jean went after Bob. 

Although he didn't slow down, Bob said, "I don't know if that's a wise idea, darlin'." 

"What did you pick up?" She demanded. "Are we about to come under attack?" 

"I'd think it'd be over already if we were," he responded cryptically. 

That was comforting. "Meaning what?" He didn't break his long, seemingly casual stride as he walked down the hall ahead of her, and she knew he wasn't going to answer her question. "Damn it, Bob, what did you sense?" She began to wonder if she could successfully use her telekinetic powers on him, freeze him until he answered. 

Maybe it was that thought that did it, because he finally decided to reply. "An Auhminra." 

"A what?" 

"I sensed an Auhminra. A soul eater." 

Jean almost laughed at the absurdity of that comment, even as she felt a vague chill."What exactly does that mean?" 

"Auhminras are rare in this dimension. They control a Hell dimension that I believe Dante once depicted as one of the nine circles of hell - I can't remember now, but I think it was the seventh, or maybe the sixth. Anyways, they are as powerful as they are nasty. They only come to this dimension to feed. Mostly." 

Not only were there times when she didn't know if Bob was joking or not, but there were times when she wished he was. This was one of those times. "There's one in the school?" 

"There was. It's gone now. I think it teleported someone out." 

"They can teleport?" 

"No, but they can sling black magic with the best of them." 

Oh, this got better and better. 

The walk down the burnished wood halls of the mansion never seemed so long, or so quiet. Most of the kids were outside or in other parts of the school, and while she could hear the distant voices, doors closing, footsteps, it seemed eerie and remote. Like an invisible barrier had slammed down to separate them from everyone else. "Did it take one of the kids?" 

"I don't know." 

"Can you stop it?" She almost said kill, and although she wouldn't admit it, that's what she meant. 

"Yes and no." 

"Pick one." 

Bob sighed, but never slowed down. "It kinda depends on who it's eaten. They like to go for things with psychic energy,and they are, in general, immune to me. Unless they're young, then their ass is mine." 

"But you can do something to stop it?" Her heart raced as she thought of all the psychics here at the school. 

"I should be able to think up something, even if I only distract it long enough for Logan to slice up the host body like a zucchini." 

Those now familiar words sent a chill down her spine. "Host body?" 

Bob nodded, but never looked back and never slowed his stride. "Soul eater, hon. It takes you over, eats you hollow, and uses your body to get around and blend in with the locals. The problem is, the body is dead, and it can only keep it animate for a little while." 

"Meaning?" 

"Eventually there's an odor, and bits started falling off, so they have to find a new person to consume and inhabit. They like psychics 'cause their energy is so potent they can siphon off little bits of it at a time, and keep the person's body alive longer, extending the shelf life of the host." 

She couldn't help it. It was so morbid she shuddered, and wrapped her arms around herself to fight her sudden chill. "It's like a Zayrith?" 

He scoffed derisively. "No. An Auhminra could eat a Zayrith like an Oreo - no competition there. They're just parasites; Auhminras are ... well, I hesitate to say gods." 

"Gods?" Oh, this was lovely. Jean was very glad she'd always been an agnostic. How awful would it be to worship a deity all your life and find out one day it wasn't what you thought it would be, but an Auhminra who'd you chew you up - literally? - and spit you out? 

"Well, from where they're from they are. But not here; they wouldn't need a host to hide in if they were god like here." 

Like you, she thought, but didn't say, as they had finally reached Logan's room. Bob knocked loudly on the door, and then as he opened the door, said, "Wakey wakey big guy. We've got - " 

But Bob seemed to freeze in the open doorway, and she was forced to look over his shoulder. Logan's bed was empty - the whole room was empty. 

"No," Bob said, so quietly she almost didn't hear him. 

She slid past him into the room, and her suggestion he hadn't come back here died in her throat as she saw his leather jacket draped over the corner chair, and his boots beside the nightstand. His bed was still made, but the coverlet was rumpled, like someone had been laying on top of it. On impulse, she reached down and placed her hand on the blanket. "It's still warm," she reported, feeling his body heat still trapped in the fabric. This close she could smell him too. 

Maybe it was because it was unbearable to his sensitive nose, but he never wore after shave, or used any strongly scented shampoo; he usually smelled like nothing more than soap. A strangely clean and delicate scent for a man who was so tough. It was unbelievable how ominous this all seemed. 

"Is he still in the vicinity?" Bob asked, and she saw a brightness in his eyes that she only associated with fear. But she had never seen anything even remotely like it in Bob. 

"What? How would I-" 

"Psychic link, Jean." 

"I only have one with Scott, and the Professor." 

He gave her a look of great impatience, jaw muscles tightening as his eerie eyes narrowed. "I ain't gonna tell him, honey. Logan's life is on the line here: tell me if he's still close." 

She met his stare, letting her confusion and anger show while swallowing back all her fear. "What do you mean you won't tell him? Won't tell who what?" 

Bob's glare was unrelenting, as bright and hard as the sun. "Do you really want to play a stupid game now? I know you have a link with him, and I even know all about those harmless dreamscape excursions with Logan the half - naked gardener. I can keep goin' if you like, but I honestly don't care if you're havin' a premature midlife crisis and want to cuckold Scott - it ain't my business. The Auhminra has Logan - is he still close by?" 

She was infuriated by his dismissive tone and his accusations - but mostly she was embarrassed and angry at herself. How long had he known? Had he told Logan? And what the hell did he mean she wanted to cuckold Scott? She did not! But even as she was poised to say these things, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes, shutting him out. 

It took greater effort to quiet her emotions, but once she did she reached out with her mind, hoping to prove Bob wrong by showing she had no link with Logan. She was sure she didn't ... did she? 

(So those dreams actually happened? Unconsciously? Oh good lord ... ) 

She sensed the other psychics throughout the school, little multicolored lights in the telepathic darkness, running from blue to green to yellow to red, depending on their strength and ability. Scott wasn't a light but a familiar, comforting shape in the darkness, while the Professor was a white light, a star going nova. Bob, much closer, was a psychic energy unlike anything she had ever encountered before:he was ultraviolet, an infrared hole ripped in the psychic fabric, something she could almost hear/feel as a high, clear hum, the note of a crystal chime held, sustained, but it was a siren song that could destroy her if she got too close. He was impossible to block out at this distance, so she just shoved him to the background as she reached out as far as she could. 

If she had a link with Logan - a big if - he would not appear as a light, having no psychic powers. But he would show up as a familiar shape, but not at all like Scott; where Scott was a peaceful harbor, Logan was a maelstrom, a tempest reined in by a dam mosaic of shattered memories and thick fibers of pain that had burrowed into his subconscious like worms. 

And she got no sense of that at all. 

She opened her eyes and shook her head. "I'm not picking him up. I don't think he's here." 

Bob scowled, shaking his head. "Shit. We have to find him as soon as possible." 

"Why would it want Logan? You said it liked psychics." 

"Yeah, but I also said the body dies. Usually the demon's presence alone is enough to kill people eventually. But this is Logan we're talkin' about here." 

Her heart seemed to stutter as she understood what Bob was saying. "You mean ... " 

Bob nodded again, but he seemed grim, almost angry. "The Auhminra won't kill him. Logan is the perfect host - a body that will never die." 

Fear coursed down her spine like cold water, and she wondered if Logan - him; not his body - was still alive. 

    9 

    At first, Logan tried to fight. 

But there was no fighting, not in a situation like this. The bastard even taunted him, letting him see out his own eyes, but he felt like a backseat driver, unable to command a single bit of his own body. He was trapped in a prison of flesh, muscle, metal, and bone, and he could do nothing about it. 

Somehow he was conscious, yet not. It was like he was adrift in his own mind, deaf, dumb, and blind to everything going on in the outside world. And yet he was starting to see things, and while he ran through the possibilities - Heydon continuing to taunt him, hallucinations,his life flashing before his eyes - he really didn't know what to think, so he stopped. 

But the images kept happening,and he slowly realized they were memories, fragments of things he had done, and things he could vaguely recall. He didn't know what it meant, or if Heydon was doing this somehow, but the frustration was starting to drive him bananas. Why hadn't the bastard knocked him out or something? 

Logan found himself inside a ring surrounded by chain link fencing, and recognized the 'ultimate' fighting cage from Laughlin City. He was alone in it, the floor cold under his bare feet, and there wasn't even a crowd, although he could still smell the traces of them, their cigarettes, beer, sweat and after shave; fatigue, boredom, testosterone, and restlessness. 

He looked for his corner, as he didn't have his shirt on either, and he was cold. But usually there was no need for heat in the ring, as you could work up a good sweat fighting. What his fights lacked in duration (had he ever had one that lasted two minutes?), they made up for in sheer quantity. He once took on thirty six guys in one night, and even then he barely broke a sweat. 

He saw his leather jacket hanging from the far right corner in the dim illumination, the heavy cigarette smoke from the ghostly crowd turning the available light a polluted blue, and he started walking to it, finding the quiet eerie and unnatural. If this was a memory, it was all wrong; distorted on its base, askew on its foundation. 

"Do you have any idea what's happening here?" A familiar voice asked, freezing him in his tracks. 

Naomi. 

He turned to face her, and saw her as he did the last time - the real Naomi, not her doppelganger from the other dimension. Her hair was short and slightly spiky, dyed that impossible hue of crimson, a lovely contrast to her troubled blue eyes. She was wearing the same blue jeans, boots, and green t-shirt she was wearing when Lethe stole her memories. 

Smoke swirled over their heads like restless ghosts on an unseen air current, and he found himself fighting contrary emotions of longing and anger, regret and hate. The anger was aimed at himself, and the hate was aimed at Heydon, for tormenting him with Naomi. "Why don't you tell me?" 

She shrugged with her hands, as if gesturing at the empty bar. "I was asking you." 

"Fuck off, Heydon," he snapped, turning away. "Fuck off or let me go." 

"Who's Heydon?" She asked. 

He paused, figuring he was still being fucked with. But she had sounded so genuinely puzzled it seemed to tug at him. 

Logan smashed the fencing with his fist, making it rattle like loose chains. "If you just manifest yourself, I'll rip your fucking face off!" 

"I hope you're not talking to me." 

He looked back at her, glaring, and then he did something that felt at once foreign and familiar - he gave up. Just like that. It was much easier than he thought. 

He leaned back against the fencing and sank down to the floor of the cage, still cold but not much caring anymore. "What do you want from me? What more can you take?" 

Naomi looked down at him sadly, and approached with caution, hands held out in front of her, as if to show she wasn't building up a lethal charge to fry him like an egg. "I don't know what's going on, Logan. Tell me, do I smell like this Heydon? I kinda hope I don't look like him." 

"You don't smell like anything," he told her. But that wasn't completely true, was it? She smelled like he remembered, but more than anything, he smelled himself all over this place. Why was that? "I know better than to trust my mind right now." 

"Why?" 

He glared at her ... him ... whatever. "He's taken me over, that's why." 

"Your mind?" 

"My body." And it was then he wondered - had his mind gotten taken over too? It must have. He couldn't feel his body at all, couldn't control a damn thing ... but did he sense Heydon here? He sensed him beyond, the walls of his prison given form and will, an invisible entity that still pressed down on him with all the weight of the world. 

But not in here. Logan suddenly realized why all he really smelled in here was himself - because this space belonged to him. Or was that what Heydon wanted him to believe? 

Either that, or Heydon just couldn't be bothered. There was nothing Logan could do in here that would effect his control on him. (Or was there..?) Maybe Heydon wouldn't give a damn until he gave him a reason to. 

And that's when other inconsistencies started occurring to him. Earlier, he felt nothing, and smelled nothing, and heard nothing - now he was cold, smelled himself and memories of Naomi, and he heard her voice. Why? The pressure of Heydon's domination hadn't changed. 

"Am I adapting?" He asked Naomi. If she wasn't Heydon, then she was a memory, or even a fragment of himself in the guise of her memory. 

She sat down on the floor next to him, and tentatively reached out a hand, touched his shoulder. He could feel the electricity crawling over his skin like insects. "I don't know. But you have a knack for it." 

No, he didn't, but his body did. It could adapt to and neutralize every germ, every toxin that he knew of, given time. Could it even adapt to a demonic possessor, recognize it as a foreign organism and reject it? 

It seemed like too much to hope for. But there was no denying he was starting to feel stronger within himself, like he ... like he still was, still existed. 

Maybe Heydon wasn't keeping him conscious to torture him. Maybe he couldn't really knock him out. 

Logan realized he may have given up too soon. All he had to do was be patient.  
His time would come. 

Okay, he hadn't had much of a life, but it was all he had. And no demonic fuck was going to take it away from him. 

** 

    Scott knew something was wrong when Jean and Bob came back, and he knew by Jean's posture alone. She had her arms wrapped around herself, as if cold, and what he liked to think of as 'trouble lines' were now etched on her brow and gathered in the corners of her eyes. 

The fact that Logan was not with them only occurred to him as an afterthought. 

Bob told them this new and fantastic story, and Scott would have laughed at it, except Jeannie looked so miserable. When she sat down beside him on the couch, he reached out to take her hand,and she instantly recoiled. After a moment, she seemed to realize what she had done and reached for his hand. When she took it, he noticed it was ice cold, and he felt his stomach twist as he realized she was so worried about Logan she wanted almost nothing to do with him. 

God damn it. The bastard wasn't even here, and yet he was still tearing them apart. 

Xavier was obviously concerned, as the trouble lines crinkled his brow as well, and he asked Bob, "How do we find him?" 

"I can ask Ammy to throw a location spell, but the Auhminra might have cloaked himself, especially if he's aware of me. But, I'm thinkin' you might be able to get through to Logan." 

"What do you mean?" 

"I thought if it was immune to you, it would be immune to telepaths," Jean said, squeezing his hand reassuringly. He got the sense she was now trying to make it up to him. 

"Yes. But I think if you and Jean link up, and you use the Cerebro gizmo, you might be able to connect with Logan - and I mean him, the part of him still alive in there. The problem is, as soon as the Auhminra gets a sense of you, he'll probably sever the link, but maybe Logan will be able to tell you something about the demon, and maybe you'll get a fix on his location." 

"Why can't you do it?" Scott asked. 

"I can't use Cerebro, for one. For another, I can't sneak in the back door. He might not be aware of Human telepaths right away. But when you're the Drai'shajan, there's no such thing as sneakin' in unnoticed." 

"You think he's still alive?" Jean asked breathlessly, her eyes full of hope. It felt like she had just punched him in the gut. 

"This is Logan we're talkin' about. Hands up if you think some punk ass demon could kill him in one fell swoop." 

Scott almost raised his hand, but Jean was still holding onto it. 

"Is this dangerous?" Scott asked instead. 

Bob grimaced, and he seemed to glance around the room as if looking for a cue card. "I wouldn't think so. The Auhminra couldn't absorb their psychic energy from a great distance." 

"But?" He prompted. He still didn't trust Bob - how could he? 

"But Auhminras are nasty creatures. To them Humans are little more than hogs that need butchering. I can't guarantee that it won't lash out in some way." 

"Or take it out on Logan," Xavier said, frowning in concern. 

Bob slowly rolled his shoulders, a tentative shrug. "Possibly. But there's no other way to find him. I know Logan would agree to anything, any kind of pain, as long as we could help him beat this thing." 


	6. Part 6

No one disputed that. Pain didn't seem to mean a hell of a lot to Logan, not at the end of the day. That was possibly the most frightening thing about him. If he wanted something, you couldn't really stop him - he just kept coming, no matter what you threw at him. It made him, in Scott's estimation, a borderline psychopath. But even he had to admit if he wasn't so emotionally unbalanced and slanted towards amorality, he was exactly the fighter you wanted on your team. He just wished that Logan wasn't such a complete and utter asshole. 

"I take it the sooner we do this, the better." Xavier said. It didn't sound like a question, but he thought it was. 

Bob nodded, looking grim. "I think Logan will be more than he can handle, and he will hang in there much longer than anticipated, but yes, we need to locate them as soon as possible.I'm going to need a plan in place to try and take it down." 

"Are you going to do anything?" Scott wondered archly. He seemed eager to volunteer everyone else for the dangerous missions. 

Bob fixed him with a look so cold he would swear he felt it right down to the base of his spine. "I assure you, Mr. Summers, that the final fight will be between me and the Auhminra alone, and I am going in for war. Either I get Logan out, or I don't come back. After all he's done for me, it's the least I can do." 

Scott actually believed him this time, and not just because he used his last name, or glared at him like he was trying to make his head explode. Bob would really go to the mat for Logan - what he didn't understand was why. "But why is this so all fire important?" 

"Scott," Jean snapped, horrified. 

But he could only give her an apologetic grimace before going on. "Miranda is going to die, and soon, and that's all beside the fact that she erased the existence of an entire town and could do it - or something worse - any minute now. If Logan can't be killed by this thing, what's the hurry?" 

Bob sighed, and crossed his muscular arms over his chest. He wondered if those were as phony as his eye color. "The power and range of an Auhminra is usually contained by the fact they constantly need fresh hosts, and the transfer drains their power. In Logan, the Auhminra could be considered immortal - where's the restraint on its power? And if that's not bad enough, it's in Logan, for Buddha's sake! Rock hard muscles, big nasty claws. Need I say more?" 

"But I thought he drank souls, or whatever." Scott knew he was just being churlish and contrary at this point, but he couldn't stop himself. He hated himself for his own pettiness. What was the matter with him? 

"And it's a demon who likes to kill people," Bob replied, one eyebrow raised. "Got an answer for that?" 

Of course he didn't, and they all knew it. Although Jean was still holding his hand,he could feel her disappointment as if she was telepathically sending it. He didn't dare look at her, and slipped his hand from her grasp. 

They left to Cerebro just as Storm and Tanith joined them, and Bob asked them to stay there for a moment. Storm wondered what was going on, but Tanith looked at Bob with a look somewhere between adoration and awe , and had no problem going along with it. Oh god, she had a crush on him? He wasn't even Human. 

Bob stood well back from Cerebro as the door opened, so just the three of them went inside. Xavier led the way, the hum of his wheelchair so soft it was barely audible as it moved along the metal tongue of the ramp leading to the heart of Cerebro itself. The floor was a long way down, for reasons that had never been clear to Scott, although supposedly some of the generators and really delicate, obscure machinery were tucked down there, away from where too much psychic energy could inadvertently destroy it. 

Jean followed Xavier closely, and he hung back, realizing he had no place among the telepaths. As always, Cerebro was at least ten degrees colder than the hallway, and sounds echoed curiously in the dome shaped metal room, seemingly reverberating from every point ahead and beside them before coming back to their ears. 

Xavier maneuvered himself in front of the high tech desk housing the tougher components of Cerebro, and lifted up the silver metal diadem that was the focal point of the machine. "Are you ready?" He asked Jean. 

She nodded, and placed her hands on Xavier's shoulders, as if offering moral support. He backed up to the doorway, the sensors picking up the interruption in the doorway and not closing as Xavier put the headpiece on. He only knew something was happening when Jean's back and shoulders seemed to go rigid, as if tensing for a blow. 

"Good luck," he said quietly, leaning against the side of the door, arms crossed over his chest.He wished he could do something to help. 

Maybe he didn't like Logan, but he hated being helpless even more. 

    10 

    Logan knew something was happening a couple seconds before it actually did. 

Naomi had looked up towards the naked light bulbs suspended from the raftered ceiling, then said, "Are we expecting company?" 

He looked up, then around, seeing nothing. "What - " 

She was gone, just like that. He got to his feet warily, now aware he did sense something, but it wasn't Heydon. It was familiar, yet he couldn't place it... 

...until Xavier and Jean suddenly appeared in the cage, standing right in front of him. 

More shocking than the fact that they were in here - desperately out of place, Jean in her L.A. outfit sans windbreaker, Xavier in his impeccably tailored silver grey suit - was the fact that Xavier was no longer paraplegic; he was standing, the wheelchair nowhere in sight. He thought this was another hallucination, except he could sense their presence, smell them, and knew they were actually here. 

"Logan," Jean said, and hugged him, sighing in relief. He exhaled in relief as well, holding her tight, enjoying her warmth and her familiar smell. There was a moment when they may have kissed, but because Xavier was here it passed very quickly, unremarked upon. 

"It got me in my sleep," he explained, feeling ashamed at be grabbed, even if it was by a demon. "By the time I realized he was there, he had me." 

"How are you?" Xavier asked, and something in his ice blue eyes said that he knew that was a silly question. 

"Still alive, for now," he said, as Jean slipped out of his arms and stepped back, taking her place beside Xavier. "You shouldn't be here." 

"We have to find you," Jean said, and her eyes seemed to slide down his face, unable to meet his eyes for the moment. She didn't want Xavier to pick any of this up. "He took you from the mansion." 

"Can you tell us anything about the demon?" Xavier asked, all business. Logan had a feeling he'd picked up on all the sub-text Jean wanted him to miss, but he was pretending he hadn't, respecting their privacy. 

"His name's Heydon, he's an arrogant and powerful fuck, and he has total control of me. I've been trapped inside my mind ever since, and it's starting to drive me crazy. Well, crazier." 

"Did he construct this cage?" Xavier asked, glancing around. 

Logan almost laughed, but he shook his head instead. "Part of my past - Laughlin City. I'm always in one cage or another."  
"Do you know where he's taken you? What he's planning?" The Professor continued.  
Logan shook his head again. "He did let me see through his - my - eyes for a moment. I couldn't even feel my body." 

"Did you see anything that would tell you where you are?" Xavier urged. He was getting the impression that time was of the essence, and Logan was willing to believe that was true. 

"No. It was a sunny day in Any Big City, USA. Man, in Europe, you always know where you are - London, Dublin, and Paris look nothing like each other. But things are so homogeneous in the States ... " he paused, and scoured his brief memories for anything that could indicate place. "Wait a minute - cars on the street." He closed his eyes and tried to recall them, driving past, people's lives going on as always while his was hijacked, ripped out from under him like a flimsy carpet. Logan got it. "Cali plates," he said, opening his eyes. "I'm in California." 

Xavier smiled at him proudly, as if he was both impressed and yet knew he could do it. "Excellent. I should be able to pinpoint your location." 

Even Jean gave him a faint , encouraging smile , but she looked so worried he thought she might actually be ill. He knew the feeling. 

"Bob is going to get you out of this," she said, trying to be reassuring. 

He appreciated it, even if she seemed to find it hard not to cry. "He'd better. If it's anything, I seem to be getting stronger the more time passes." 

"How so?" Xavier asked. 

"I can't really explain it. Things just feel more real now; I have a sense of self, I'm starting to feel things. I don't know if I could control my - " he gestured to the cage around them. " - my mindscape, but maybe. I think my body is trying to reject him." 

"Like a foreign organism,"  Jean said admiringly, eyes brightening in slim hope. 

He nodded, and Xavier asked, "Do you think it will work?" 

Logan shook his head, wishing he could be optimistic, but it seemed to be against something in his genetic make up. "No. But maybe it's a tiny weakness that could be exploited." 

Xavier nodded, obviously considering his words. "I will pass that on." 

"Pass on what?" A familiar, sanguine voice said behind him. 

Logan knew who it was without looking; the impeccable Heydon, leering at them, oozing smugness like a slime trail. Jean's and Xavier's eyes darted towards him, and that gave Logan the exact location of his target.  
He spun on his heels with a scream of rage, leaping at Heydon and popping his claws in mid air, intending to hurt him if nothing else. 

But Logan felt like a lightning bolt of ice hit him, shattering his skull and traveling straight down his spine, alternately burning and freezing the vertebrae as it traveled, making him taste copper. 

"Logan!" Jean shouted, as he hit the floor of the cage face first, a bone shattering landing that made him really feel his phantom body now, taste blood. 

He tried to shove himself up, but couldn't. He couldn't move his arms or his legs. 

Logan was paralyzed. 

** 

    That old saying about the banality of evil was only right about half the time. 

Charles Xavier had lived a long time, and seen and experienced a lot of things, and he knew evil could stretch the gamut from simple ignorance to overblown, despotic nihilism. He also knew you could not make a judgment on it by first sight. 

But he still felt confident that they were facing a thing of pure evil. 

Heydon looked like a stockbroker he once met, the kind that was born into privilege, went to a tony school like Princeton or Harvard, and while they worked constantly and had a prissy, controlling streak, had never really done any real work at all; the type of person who had never suffered pain, struggled through hard times, or labored for anything, and couldn't imagine doing it. Why would they have to? Life was theirs for the taking. Anyone's life, in fact. 

Xavier couldn't read him. Unlike a wall of black glass, his mind was like sharp static, a background buzz like a hive of angry bees, and his smile was a leer of pure, self - satisfied arrogance. He glanced down at the fallen Logan like he was a particularly ugly insect that had fallen in his path, and then stepped casually around him, a man deftly avoiding an inconvenient pile of dog shit on the sidewalk. His eyes were perfectly empty, misty grey and two dimensional, looking as if they might be more at home on a cartoon than a person. 

"Leave them alone," Logan growled, his words so full of hate it was almost palpable in the squalid little cage. He'd always found it sad that Logan allowed himself to be exploited for money, in circumstances like this, but he had to acknowledge there was little else he could do. Dangerous people wanted him, and Logan was too wary of people to ever settle in one place for too long. 

Logan's muscles corded like cables beneath his skin, veins bulged, and it looked like he was fighting an invisible enemy that was keeping him pinned down to the floor. A quick glimpse of his angry, panicked thoughts revealed that Heydon had paralyzed him, leaving him unable to move his limbs. 

Heydon chuckled, but stared at them, not even glancing back at Logan. "Or what? You'll flop me to death, mutie?" He and Jean both took an involuntary step back as his eyes bored into them in an almost physical sense. It didn't matter that they couldn't read him; his hunger was palpable, evil and more depraved than either of them could have ever imagined. He thought he understood why Bob thought it was so important that they stop him. 

Jean held up a hand in his direction, and Heydon stopped short. Behind him, Logan had used the muscles of his shoulders and torso to shove himself up on his side; there was a small smear of blood on his face from his split lips and broken nose, and it didn't look like they were healing, probably because Heydon wasn't letting it happen. But Logan didn't look pained more than utterly furious, and he could feel the heat from his thoughts as if they were molten. Xavier found Logan's anger obscurely fascinating, as he had never met anyone whose rage was almost a second personality, a deadly state of mind that could run away with the otherwise dominant personality. It confirmed that Logan's life had been full of trauma, even if he could only remember the recent bits of it. 

Xavier wondered if Heydon knew exactly what he was stirring up here. 

Heydon grinned coldly, showing toothpaste ad perfect teeth, whiter than white and harder than marble."A 'kinetic. Ooh, I haven't had one of those in a long time." 

Jean was suddenly thrown back violently, slamming so hard into the chain link fence that it bowed and almost collapsed under her weight. She slid down to the floor, looking dazed, and he smacked his lips lasciviously. "You'll be a tasty one, red." 

"You want me, you stupid motherfucker!" Logan roared, veins standing out in relief on his neck, his skin flushing dark in rage. It looked like he was bleeding more from his nose and mouth, as if adrenaline was thinning his blood, but even as it began to puddle on the floor beneath his head he paid it no mind at all. In this pure state of anger, he was beyond pain - Heydon had hurt Jean, and now Logan was viciously homicidal. If he could move, he wouldn't just kill Heydon; he would tear him up until nothing was left, until his remains could only be scooped up by a shovel. "Come on, take me! Come on, you cowardly fuck! Maybe it'll be a fair fight now!" 

That made Heydon chuckle again, shake his head as if Logan was just a misbehaving child. "Can you believe the arrogance of this beast?" 

"Even afraid to face me when I'm down?!" Logan shouted, obviously trying to bait Heydon into attacking him. As always, Logan's courage was suicidal and astounding. 

"Be quiet," Heydon said, with a dismissive gesture, and from the way Logan's mouth opened and suddenly shut, Heydon had now robbed him of the ability to speak. He was crippling him by increments, and enjoying it. But muscles jumped beneath the skin of Logan's jaw like angry snakes trying to burst through the flesh, and the hate in his eyes was hard to look upon : if looks could kill, there'd be nothing left of Heydon except a smell of burned meat, and a very small char mark on the floor. 

Although he hated to leave Logan like this, he knew it was time to cut the connection, and tried to pull himself and Jean back to their bodies, but was unsuccessful - the dark presence of Heydon had closed in on them like like this cage, only the walls were psychic and very thick. He was already far too powerful, and Xavier was sure Bob had no idea, although he must have been fearing just this. 

Heydon gave him a slippery smile, as if they were compatriots. "You know, for all his cockiness, the boy's a mess. Stupid too - knowing what he knows about his healing abilities, he has still tried to kill himself! The last time was a couple of months before you found him - did you know? Clawed himself in the heart. Bled all over, ruined his clothes, knocked himself out for a bit, but that was all. Next day, he was back drinking in seedy bars, picking fights, making himself feel better by beating the shit out of loggers and sleeping with whatever burned out tart gave him the eye. Some hero he is, huh?" 

Xavier spent the time Heydon was blathering probing the darkness surrounding them telepathically. There was no reading Heydon's mind, no, but he was deciding on a focused attack. On the floor, Logan had managed to squirm around more in Heydon's direction. Continuing to piss him off, even in his compromised state, was not wise. Heydon was in his body, and still he knew nothing about him. He was an idiot - an extremely powerful idiot, the very worst kind. 

He went back and helped Jean up to her feet. She looked more stunned - by what Heydon had done, by what he was saying about Logan - than hurt, although a small trickle of blood was starting to drip from one nostril.  
"Hey, chrome dome, aren't you listening?" 

Xavier turned and faced Heydon with the cool disdain he deserved. "I don't appreciate you hurting my people." 

Heydon let out a startled blurt of a laugh. "Oh, don't you? Well, what exactly can you do about it, Jean - Luc?" 

"There are more powers than yours," he told him, then let him have it. 

Not everyone understood that telepathy could be used as a weapon. Admittedly, only powerful telepaths could, and there was some hesitation to use it as such - to completely flood a person's mind with stimuli, to overload synapses and clog neurons - was to risk popping the brain cells like popcorn, to cause a potentially fatal aneurysm or burst blood vessel, but this was a demon, and, more to the point, he really didn't give a damn if he did. Maybe some of Logan's toxic rage was imbuing itself in the atmosphere. 

Heydon staggered under the sudden, unexpected assault, and Jean, realizing what he was doing, closed her eyes against the pain and joined in. Their thoughts intertwined, a telepathic missile shot straight at the demon at the speed of thought. 

He fell to his knees, then all fours, and looked up at them with blood more orange than red gushing from both nostrils. "Oh, that's good. That's good, bitch. You're gonna make a hell of a meal, baldy." 

It was then they felt the dark walls of Heydon's thoughts collapse in on them, feeling like a genuine, crushing psychic pressure that threatened to flatten them both, sending deep shockwaves of a pain as indescribable as it was devastating through both of them. Jean let out a small cry under the strain, but managed to use her telekinesis to try and shore up their defenses, throw his mind back, but Xavier could feel that it wasn't working. The pain knifed through his brain and surged down his spine, trailing down into the legs he could only feel here, in mindscapes. He was now sorry he could as his nerve endings seemed to catch fire, flaring the pain throughout his entire body. 

But the attack must have freed up Logan somewhat, because he lunged - knees working, arms still out of commission - and used the only weapon he had left: he sunk his teeth into Heydon's throat. 

Heydon let out a genuine scream of surprise and pain, and shoved Logan away as he pulled back - not a good move. Logan had really sunk his teeth in, biting straight through, and when he shoved him away, Logan ripped a good chunk of flesh out of the side of his neck. Blood spurted from the wound as Heydon fell back on his ass, clamping a hand over the raw gash, where they could see black muscle like knots of thin wires nestled among bones as grey as a London fog. "Animal! Fucking animal!" He snapped at Logan, looking dazed, flat eyes glassy and confused. He hadn't thought Logan would do that (who did). Blood continued fountaining from the wound, leaking through his skeletally thin fingers, and they could feel Heydon's psychic walls crack, if only for a moment - shock - not pain, not anything else - was reverberating through his system, but even as they felt the crack, they could sense surging waves of anger coming up from below, like a volcano seconds away from eruption. 

Logan, thrown into a slumped sitting position against the far side of the cage, paralyzed anew, had orange blood on his mouth, chin, and chest, mingling with his darker red blood. He was either still bleeding from his nose, or Heydon's hit had aggravated the injury. He must have known, or also sensed the weakening of his psychic walls, because he screamed at them, "Get out of here!" 

And Xavier didn't need to be told twice. 

** 

    They were gone in the blink of an eye, just like Naomi, and he tried to spit the sour taste of Heydon's blood out of his mouth - it was more like pickle juice than blood, and that was more fucking disgusting. 

Heydon was now glaring at him, grey eyes turning orange, and while blood continued to seep from the hole in his throat, it was no longer spewing out like water from a broken pipe. "You fucking savage," he growled, his voice inhuman, stripped of its suave guise and cadence. 

"You bet, asshole," he growled back, letting the hate flow out towards him like a wave. If that bastard had hurt Jean, he was going to torture him before he killed him, rip his fucking arms off and make him watch. "If I'm goin', I'm takin' you with me. Any way I have to." 

Heydon's eyes narrowed to deadly slits. "Don't flatter yourself, Nomad. You will never get the chance." 

It was then that it felt like a bomb exploded inside his brain - a supernova of white hot pain that traveled through his body and seemingly out of it, bursting open his skin like he was an overcooked sausage, splitting the seam of flesh and muscle and pulverizing him from the inside out. 

It seemed to last an eternity, turning him inside out millimeter by millimeter, and he probably screamed, but he heard nothing but a keening white noise, the sound of synapses frying, burning out, dying by the hundreds of thousands. 

When the darkness finally came, it was a relief, and he didn't care if this meant he was dead. 

    11 

    It had been minutes when nothing happened at all. Bob's cell phone rang and made him jump, but other than that, it was as if time had decided to stand still. 

Scott had to stand up straight, as his shoulder was starting to hurt, and as he stretched his arms, he thought he finally saw Jean move. 

And start falling right over the edge. 

"Jeannie!" He shouted, and raced for her as she let go of Xavier's shoulders and seemed to waver on her feet, then crumple, as if fainting. He didn't think he'd reach her in time, but he grabbed her by the hips just before she completely fell over. "Jean, honey," he said, pulling her up to her feet on the catwalk. Her body was limp, her head lolling to the  side, and for one brief moment he thought she was dead. But no, she was warm, she was still breathing, just unconscious. 

Xavier was taking the Cerebro headpiece off with slow deliberation, and Scott was pretty sure he saw his hands shaking. 

"What happened?" Bob asked, voice echoing through the room. He had come closer, but was still back from the entrance. 

Jean seemed to jolt in his arms, her hands instantly going to his, but then she looked around frantically and seemed to realize where she was, and who was holding her. "Scott," she said, with obvious relief. She turned and put her arms around him, hugging him tightly, burying her face in his neck. Her face was ghostly pale, and he wasn't completely sure, but he thought he saw some blood in her nose. She was shuddering, and while he didn't think she was crying, tears were still coming out of her eyes; he could feel them trickling down his neck, seeping through his shirt. She hadn't held him this tight in a long time. 

"He's already too powerful," Xavier said, his voice as steady and dignified as always. "He almost killed us." 

"What?" Scott asked, squeezing Jean a little tighter. 

"Shit," Bob breathed, sounding more surprised than anything else. "How did you get away?" 

Xavier maneuvered the wheelchair around slowly in the limited space, and it was then Scott could see he was almost as pale as Jean, and there was a thin trickle of blood leaking from one of his nostrils. He must have noticed it, because he reached inside his jacket pocket, pulled out a white cloth handkerchief, and held it up to his nose. "Logan. He distracted him so we could get away. He probably saved our lives." 

At the mention of Logan's name, Jean shuddered more violently, and he wasn't sure if that was a coincidence or not. 

"He's still that strong?" Bob asked. 

Xavier shook his head, so delicately it was hard to tell it was a gesture. "The demon underestimated him. He won't again." 

"We left him there," Jean said, pulling back from him slightly. She looked between Xavier and Bob, tear streaks on her ashen face, hazel eyes bright with some terrible knowing. "We left him with that ..." She couldn't even think of a name for it. 

Xavier's lips thinned to a grim line. "I know. We had no choice. He knew that." 

"What happened?" Scott asked. He hoped Jean would share it with him, but on the other hand, he hoped she didn't. He had never seen them so shaken. 

Jean shook her head, and rested it against his shoulder again. "It was horrible. He's so powerful, and ... " 

"Evil," Xavier supplied, with absolutely no irony at all. 

Bob sighed loudly, sounding frustrated. "Shit. Maybe he stocked up before taking Logan over, just for insurance. Goddamn it." 

"What happened, Jean?" Scott whispered in her ear. He had to know, no matter how bad it was. 

She pulled back and looked at him, lips twisting as she considered sharing it with him. "It's bad." 

"I can take it." He hoped that was true. 

She studied his face for a moment, mentally debating with herself, and then said, "Okay. Brace yourself." 

He then had it, a flood of images fed straight into his brain, running at twice the speed of real time, although to him it unfolded like a dream, and therefore didn't seem strange at all. 

Logan standing half naked in a cage seemed strange, but the demon - Heydon - seemed even stranger when he appeared. If he was slightly shorter, had brown hair as opposed to blond, and had about twenty pounds more on his frame, he would have looked exactly like a State social worker he'd once known in his young foster home days. That instantly made him hate him. 

Then he hurt Jean. The pain translated into dark and bright spots in his vision, a knife blade sliding along his cranium, and while that made his blood boil, things began to degenerate, get worse. Logan had shouted obscenities until Heydon shut him up, and Scott wished he had that power.He was aware that Logan was out, and Xavier was fighting back, dropping Heydon, and Jean joined him, but he was also aware of something that didn't translate at all, or it was something that Jean had refused to send him; he only knew that there was a darkness closing in around her, around them. Then Logan did something beyond disgusting - god, did he really rip out Heydon's throat with his teeth? It looked like it, and Scott was appalled at the barbaric violence of the act, the sheer animalistic brutality of it. How low could one person sink? 

But it got them out. Maybe it was a brilliant tactical move on Logan's part. 

He knew that Jean had tried to edit it out, but he still got a sense of her concern for Logan, overwhelming and painful, and he knew she had edited something out at the very start, when they first saw Logan. He didn't know what - could have been anything from a hug to a kiss. He hated both, but if he had to choose, he'd choose the hug. 

Did she love him? He didn't think so, but he didn't really know anymore. He could only take comfort in the fact that by ripping out Heydon's throat with his teeth, Logan had scared the shit out of her. 

In the meantime, Xavier must have told Bob what had happened, or he had gleaned it some other way while Scott had been drifting in Jean's memories, because as he came back, he heard Bob saying, " - won't kill him. Not yet." 

"What do you mean not yet?" Jean asked, pulling away from him. She seemed to have recovered somewhat, at least enough that she wasn't shaking anymore. 

"He's gonna wanna torture him first," Bob pointed out, grimacing in sympathy. "In Heydon's view, Logan humiliated him. He should have been beaten down, paralyzed, barely hanging on and already too crazy to be useful. He was prepared for his body to rally - that's why he wanted it - but he probably hadn't counted on his will being a component in the healing factor. He will go out of his way to hurt him and hurt him badly, and for some time. Animals like people need to know their place ... in an Auhminra's estimation, of course." 

Jean hissed a sigh through clenched teeth, violently wiping the tear tracks away from her face. "We need to go get him. Professor, did you pinpoint his location?" 

"Not nearly enough," Xavier admitted ruefully. "Southern California is all I can say." 

"I'll find him," Bob replied confidently. "See, Heydon fucked up there. Not only do I have a home and family there, but Logan has a rep in the demon community." 

"What kind of rep?" Scott wondered. Maybe they thought he was one of their kind. 

"He killed a Berserker with his bare hands, and has dispatched quite a few vampires that way as well. They're so fucking freaked out by him he might as well be the Slayer. If he's anywhere in SoCal, the demon underground will be abuzz about it. And that's not even counting the fact that most demons can sense other demons, even if they're hidden inside Human bodies." 

"Vampires?" Scott said in open disbelief. "You're saying they exist? And what the hell's a Berserker?" 

"I take it you don't mean an old Viking warrior," Xavier said, with a faint but wry smile. 

Bob shook his head. "Berserkers are huge, homicidal demon killing machines. Remember what the creature in the Alien movies looked like? Sort of like that, only with eyes, and no acid blood or tail. Really hard to kill, extremely bad news, as mean as they are ugly - everybody hates and fears them. And from what Angel told me, the first time Logan met one, he took it out, no contest, in under two minutes. That's gonna impress even the most jaded demon." 

"He never mentioned that," Jean said. "He's never mentioned vampires either." 

"He's mentioned Angel though, right?" 

"Not really ... " she then got a curious look on her face. "Are you implying something?" 

"What's a Slayer?" Scott asked. 

"I think Logan's so disbelieving of all this shit himself he's decided to leave you out of it, and that's fine," Bob said, not answering either question. "Just trust me when I say if he's in California, all the demons will know of it. Let's just hope he stays there for now." 

"Why?" Jean asked, and Scott heard the defiance in her voice. 

Bob held up his cell phone, and waggled it like it was supposed to mean something. "I got a call from Ammy. She's had no luck tracking  down the Auhminra, but a locator spell turned up Miranda and Zayrith friend. They're on an island in the Pacific." 

"What island?" Xavier asked. 

Bob grinned, but it seemed painful more amused as he put the cell phone back in his pocket. "Well, see, that's the funny bit. It doesn't exist, or at least it hasn't existed before. Of course, now it does." 


	7. Part 7

"Miranda wished it into existence?" Jean's defiance had given way to interested surprise, her tears all dried up. 

"It would seem so, yes." 

Scott sighed, and secretly felt relieved. "We'll have to save her." 

Jean's eyes grew wide and hard as she looked between him and Bob. "We can't just leave Logan to that thing. You even said he'll torture him." 

Bob glanced down at the metal floor, an angry set to his jaw and pity in his eyes. "Believe me darlin', I know, but if we're gonna have a chance to save Miranda, it's now or never. Logan will have to come after." 

"No!" She snapped angrily, but instantly hesitated. A girl's life was on the line here too, and how did you choose? 

"If Logan was here," Xavier said, his quietly forceful voice making everyone turn to him. "I think we'd all know what he'd say." 

After a moment of silence, Scott said, not without irony, "Save the girl." 

Jean's shoulders seemed to slump in defeat, and she nodded, agreeing with it even as she hated it. 

"He's gonna hang in there," Bob said, trying to comfort Jean, and possibly himself. "Heydon got more than he bargained for when he took on Logan. I think it'll be the death of him." 

Scott wondered how many others it was going to kill too. 

    12 

    Consciousness returned to him in pieces. 

One fragment at a time fell into place, and there was no rushing it, no forcing it to speed up. He simply had to lay there, waiting for his sense of self to return, and then everything else, coloring itself in slowly, like dye suffusing itself into oil.  
What did he know? He knew something terrible had happened to him - he felt stripped to bone, bared of flesh and blood and memories and thoughts, a void that somehow had shape and form. Filling was a slow process that he was sure would never be completed. 

Eventually the grey fog produced light, and he realized his name was Logan, and he was staring at a fire. 

It was longer before he realized the fire was in a hearth, a red brick one, with the low fire crackling, filling the room with scent of burning cedar and pine. But it was minutes before he could smell it, and longer for him to feel its heat. 

The room started out as a vague outline, became a sketch, and slowly began to fill and color, taking on degrees of light and shadows, and he knew there were several things wrong with it, even though it took him a time unmeasurable to figure out what it was. 

The problem was this place was two different places smashed together; the chimney and the hearth belonged to a more rustic place than the rest of the house, where whitewashed walls and rice paper screens with delicate ink designs dominated, imparting a sparse sense of elegance quite at odds with the somewhat ugly and ramshackle fireplace. 

Over the mantel were two long swords with ornate black hafts, the silver of the blades reflecting the dancing shadows the fire threw out into the room. They looked familiar somehow, and he thought of them as katanas, but he had no idea what that meant. 

There were objects on the floor, which resolved itself to hardwood planks that fit together snugly if not perfectly, and clearly matched the fireplace. Within several inches of the sofa he was on, the floor changed to one of a delicate, finely napped azure carpet, and he knew it matched the other half of the house. Weird. 

The things on the floor looked like tiles, but as they slowly surfaced from the grey fog they were sunk below, he could see they were Polaroids, scattered haphazardly as if thrown up in the air and allowed to land wherever gravity and air currents brought them down. 

It took longer for the images in the photos to coalesce, amorphous blobs that took on colors before form, and even when they were done shaping themselves they still looked washed out and ill formed, weathered by time. 

When he realized he had arms and could move them, he reached out and started picking them up, glancing at them before letting them fall back to the floor. At first, it didn't make any sense at all - they showed random scenes, snatches of hallways and buildings, rooms and people, landscapes and car interiors, bars and hotels and freeways. But then it slowly dawned on him these were memories: in some kind of metaphor, they existed as physical artifacts, but ones that seemed to be fading before his eyes. 

Here was one of a cage, which should have meant something to him but didn't; here was one that showed nothing but snow, an endless, featureless blanket of white that still managed to give him a sense of deja vu that was anything but good;  something that looked like the Statue of Liberty; a metal walled corridor; a shattered bathroom sink; a door that looked like it had been clawed open by a bear;  a bed that looked similarly attacked;  a motorcycle; and a tank of green fluid that made him drop the photo in a spasm of pure, sour tasting fear, even though he had no idea what it was, or why it scared him so much. 

The people took longer to appear, and longer to recognize. The redhead, the bald guy, the white haired chick, and the guy with the weird headgear meant nothing to him; the girl had a slight familiarity, but still meant nothing; there was a picture of a brunette woman with tired eyes that made him feel melancholy; a photo of a pretty man with a sly grin and cobalt eyes made him feel exasperated, and the image of the green woman next to him made him feel more so. The next photo showed a smiling Japanese woman, partially embracing and leaning her head against a white guy with a close cropped beard and weird brown hair, who was so broad chested  it looked like it would take at least two and a half of her to make one of him. He hated the guy on sight. 

It was him, wasn't it? Shit. 

He didn't know who the woman was for a long time, but as focusing on her face brought a hollow ache to his chest, and when he remembered her name, he also realized he could finally feel his entire body. Couldn't really move, but hey, at least he could sense he had a form. He also realized the warm, slightly uncomfortable thing he was laying on was a leg; if he could trust his strangely encyclopedic sense of smell, it was hers - Mariko. And that gentle breeze ruffling his hair was her fingers stroking it, gently gliding across his scalp. He wanted to look up at her, but he still couldn't move that much. 

When he remembered how to speak, he asked, "What happened?" 

"Attacked. Place is a mess." 

His mind? That's what he assumed she meant. "Attacked by what?" 

"I can't say." 

He didn't know if that meant she didn't know, or if she actually couldn't say. Did it matter? "Why can't I feel my outer body?" Logan knew, as nonsensical as it seemed, that the body he could feel simply belonged to this ... this corner of his mind. Whatever it was. 

It was a long moment before she answered, her fingertips brushing through his hair in a comforting gesture. "Something's gone wrong." 

"I know. I can't remember anything; I can barely move." He swallowed hard - or at least it felt like he did - as he asked, "Can you help me?" 

"I don't know," she replied, and for the first time, he realized she sounded sad. "There's so much that's gone." 

"Is it permanent?" 

Another long pause. "Some of it." 

At once that thought was both comforting and frightening, and he knew there were things he best never remember at all. 

** 

    The wind started to pick up, howling through the palm trees like a thing possessed. 

Maybe all Pacific islands had such mercurial weather - but this fucking moody? One moment it was clear, and then next it was grey with cotton candy clouds, the sun smothered, and anemic breeze became a screaming tempest. 

Well, for all of a minute. 

"Stop," Miranda said, never getting up from the daybed. The winds stopped dead, as if she had simply closed a window. But considering she wasn't even in a house, that's probably not what happened. 

"This is boring," Cressa complained. "Let's do something." 

Miranda shifted the covers off her head, so she could glare at Cressa, who was sitting on a path made of glass, smashing diamonds into dust with a hammer. It was a pointless activity that seemed to make her happy. She liked breaking stuff. 

"I think it's killing me," she pointed out, not bothering to lift her head. Her skull felt like it was full of molten lead, searingly hot and impossibly heavy, the pain like a constant dull drilling, like someone had turned on the jackhammers. 

Cressa frowned at her, stopping her smashing for now. "Don't be so melodramatic." 

Technically, her daybed was in the middle of a tropical sward, surrounded by birds of paradise shrubs (she didn't know if they were shrubs, but imagined they were) and palm trees, pineapple trees and ferns (ferns were everywhere, weren't they). The sky had turned blue again, but she brought in so wispy clouds to cover the sun, as the light hurt her eyes, which already felt like throbbing, open wounds in her head. 

"I'm not being melodramatic," she snapped, anger making the pounding in her head that much worse. "I can't even fucking stand up anymore, or haven't you noticed?" 

Cressa sighed, like she was the one in pain, and stood up, brushing the diamond dust off her skirt. "Wish it away." 

"Don't you think I've tried that? I've also tried to wish in some pain killers, but they don't work either." 

"How about some vodka? I hear that's a good pain killer." 

There was a lightness in Cressa's tone that suggested she either thought she was faking, or honestly didn't care how much pain she was in. Some friend she was. 

In fact, it was safe to say she had tired of her pushy 'friend' very quickly. "Do you even care?" 

"Of course I care," she replied, adding a slight chuckle at the end, like she couldn't believe she'd ask such a stupid question. But her eyes remained as hard as the diamonds she had been smashing, and Miranda knew she was lying. 

"Go away," she said. 

Cressa cocked her head and smiled nervously. "What?" 

"I wish you would go away," she reiterated, and absolutely nothing happened. That wasn't right. 

None of this was right, in fact. This whole wishing things into and out of existence was fun, for a while, but it seemed to be causing her brain to compress inside her skull. 

Cressa's grin turned leering, almost mocking. "You didn't try and wish me away, did you?" 

"It didn't work." She was surprised, but not really as stunned as she should have been. 

"No, because you really didn't mean it." 

"Bullshit, I meant it." She looked at her with narrow eyes, the pulsing in her head a thousand times worse, the roaring of the blood in her head covering up the roar of the ocean. "What the fuck are you?" 

Cressa's smile suddenly faltered, and she seemed to look around nervously. "Tell you what - take us to the mainland, and I'll show you." 

"No." 

"Come on - something bad's on the way. Let's get out of here, huh?" 

She looked positively nervous, and this was the first time Miranda had seen her express any emotion without a hint of smugness. "I can take care of it. What's coming Cressa?" 

"No, you can't," Cressa sniped impatiently. "You have no idea what's going on. Get us the fuck out of here!" 

"I said no." 

"What an awkward position," a man suddenly said. He had an Australian accent, like that actor guy, but she couldn't see him from her vantage point. "Strong enough to cripple, but not strong enough to transport." 

Cressa started backing towards her, her spine stiffening. "You don't want it hurt, Drai' shajan.Stay back." 

"Don't start none, won't be none," the man replied, with an almost perverse sense of cheeriness. But while he was probably being funny, Miranda wasn't so far gone that she didn't hear the hard edge - and implied threat - in his tone. 

"How did you get here?" Miranda asked, rearranging herself and the blanket so she could him. Movement made the pain swell in her head, turned her vision to a brief fireworks display, but once things had settled down, and the real world came surging back in, she saw a tall guy in leather pants and a white t - shirt standing on the glass path, his black leather boots crushing diamond dust to an even finer powder. When he looked at her, his eyes were too blue to be believed. 

"I zapped myself in. Nice place you got here, darlin', even if you were a bit fuzzy on the details." 

"Zapped yourself in?" 

"Get him out of here, now," Cressa hissed. She was within arm's reach of the bed. 

"Are you tryin' to make her head explode?" The Aussie asked. "You know she can't wish me away." 

"Is that a dare?" She really didn't like Cressa telling her what to do, but she really resented this pretty boy dropping out of nowhere and telling her what she could and couldn't do. "I wish you'd go away." 

The man held his hands up at his sides in an exaggerated shrug. "Told ya, sweetheart." 

If she had the energy, she would have been furious. "Why can't I fucking wish you people away?!" 

"I'm not a person, technically," the man said. "And certainly your friend there doesn't even come close." 

Miranda had a feeling whatever fragile grasp she had on reality had gotten lost a long time ago - she was no longer sure what day it was, week, month, or year. Her head hurt so much she couldn't even think. But some things were getting through. "If she isn't a person, what the fuck is she?" 

The man - he was good looking, in an irritating sort of way - stared straight into her eyes, and said, "The pain is going away, Miranda. Distance yourself from it." 

She opened her mouth to tell him he could go fuck himself - there was pain; it was the worst pain she had ever experienced - but then she realized the pain really was ebbing away, becoming incrementally more bearable. She sat up as it did, and asked one more time, "Cressa, what the hell are you?" 

Then the pain came crashing back, making her cry out in pain and grab her head between her hands before it exploded like a balloon. She could barely hear Cressa say, "You're too late, asshole. She belongs to me now." 

"Let her go, and you can live in some other dimension. This is your only chance, Zayrith." 

Her head must have imploded. None of this made any sense. In a strange way, she wished someone would kill her, just so she wouldn't hurt anymore. 

Cressa chuckled coldly. "Hardly. Maybe I can't move myself places yet, but I can remove things. Hope you can swim, Drai' shajan. Because the ground beneath is going to disappear right now." 

Miranda waited to hear it happen, and belatedly wondered what Cressa had meant when she said she belonged to her now. 

    13 

    Logan now had a better idea of what he was, and what had happened, and he was almost too enervated to be angry. 

"Can I fight him?" He asked, aware that that was probably a stupid question. If he could do something, would he be here? 

"I don't think so." She paused for a long moment. "I'm not sure." 

"What? Is there a chance?" 

"Not directly." 

"Indirectly?" He pondered that a moment, but found it impossible to get his head around it. "I don't understand. What do you mean?" 

She didn't answer for the longest time, she just kept stroking his hair; now it seemed like a nervous gesture. "I'm not the strategist." 

He wondered what part of his mind was; if it even existed anymore. 

Logan closed his eyes, the firelight turning the inside of his eyelids blood red, and tried to remember Mariko. He vaguely remembered the dream he had before Heydon had taken him, but it was more a sense memory, something his skin and his body remembered more than his mind. He recalled the feeling of her wrapped around him, her breasts and hips pressed against him, her hands moving over his body like he was a sensual piece of kinetic sculpture, something coded with a message in Braille that she had to seek out. Her warmth and her scent seemed to tingle on his skin, like she was actually here, and a strange desire curled inside his gut. He wanted her right now, to feel her again and have her fill up his emptiness. But since he was in his own mind, that was probably some form of mental masturbation, and he had no time or inclination for that. Well, not really. 

The only thing he could honestly recall about her in his memory was that she made him feel Human, in the best sense of the word. With her he was a normal man, with a normal life, and not a freak with a tortured past jumping at shadows and running from a thing that had neither shape nor form in his traitorous brain. He wanted that feeling back; he wanted her back. 

"It was a delusion, wasn't it?" He said aloud, opening his eyes. But he didn't dare look at her, just at the dying flames in the hearth. Their warmth was distant, as if took ages for it to cross the room. "That feeling. I wanted to be normal for you so bad I almost convinced myself I could be." 

"Normal is subjective." 

In that moment, she sounded like Bob. 

As he forced himself to sit up (why it was so difficult he had no idea; he felt like he was trying to move through a sea of molasses), her hand trailing from his hair, down his neck and back, she said quietly, "I didn't want normal. I wanted you." 

That could be taken in a couple of different ways, but he knew that she - or whatever aspect of his mind she represented at the present moment - only meant that in the best way possible. 

He propped his elbows on his knees, rested his head in his upraised hands, and tried to think. Attack Heydon indirectly; come at him from an angle he wouldn't expect ... where the hell would that be? He was trapped inside his own fucking mind; he was limited in what he could do. 

What Logan wanted to know was why the nightmare memories that drove other telepaths from his mind didn't work on Heydon. Maybe because he was a demon, and maybe because he was a fucking sadist and liked it. So the main arsenal in the weapon hadn't worked - time for plan B. 

Now he just had to figure out what the fuck was plan B. 

** 

    Nothing happened, and Cressa seemed pretty shocked about it. 

It was then Miranda noticed that there was someone sitting cross legged on the ground several feet behind the Aussie; she would have sworn she hadn't seen her before now. 

And in fact she stopped seeing her - it was like light stopped near her, and would go no further. 

"What the fuck is that?" Cressa demanded. 

"Zero - she'd say hi, but she's busy right now, keeping the molecules of the ground in place. Wanna try again?" 

Miranda propped herself up against the headrest, and glared at the side of Cressa's face. "What the fuck are you?" She was starting to get the idea that she hadn't created Cressa at all, any more than she had created the guy, or the strange girl who now seemed to be hidden behind a black hole of her own devising. 

Cressa suddenly reached behind her, and grabbed Miranda by the leg. Another sizzling pain knifed through her brain and she screamed, trying to pull away but unable, as the electric pain had rendered her weak, making her feel positively boneless. "I warned you, Drai'shajan -" 

But whatever Cressa was going to say was cut off, as she was hit from behind by what looked like a bolt from a laser cannon, a red flash that sent Cressa flying as if hit with a wrecking ball. She landed hard, face first on the ground, and only a couple of feet from the Aussie. 

The guy looked down at her, and asked casually, "What were you saying, darlin'?" 

    Miranda was sure Cressa was down for good - how did that not cave in her skull like a melon? - but her hands moved, and it looked like she was about to try and prop herself up. "Jean, if you would," the Aussie said, looking off to Miranda's far left. 

Pain ebbing to tiny little shocks in her head, a little prickling sensation not unlike the pins and needles sensation you got when you tried to move a body part that had fallen asleep, she looked behind her to see a red haired woman coming across the grass. She wore the same kind of black leather/proto-Nazi outfit the laser beam guy coming out of the trees wore, so she assumed they were together, but she didn't have the laser beam glasses. She had a look of intense concentration on her face, though, and her black gloved hand was raised palm up, as if preparing to ward off something. 

The Aussie crouched down in front of Cressa, and as Cressa looked up, gasping as desperately as a fish on dry land, he said, "She's paralyzed your vocal chords, so there's no more foolishness on your part. And unless you want to get used as target practice, I suggest you stay down and think about how you want to play this." 

The redhead was now next to her, giving her a concerned look. "Miranda, are you all right?" 

She squinted at the woman, and asked, "Who the fuck are you? How do you know my name?" 

"I'm Jean, and that's Scott," she said, gesturing to headgear guy. "We're here to help." 

"Help what?" 

"I know you know that Cressa ain't exactly what you thought she was," the Aussie guy said, standing back up. Why wasn't he wearing a snazzy biker get up? Well, he had the pants and the boots ... "What she is is a parasite who's killin' you. That pain in your head? It's her. She's using your abilities to create a better vessel for herself. It'll kill you in the process, but ask her how much she cares. Oh, right, you can't. But if she could talk she'd tell you a lot of bullshit that still equals up to not at all." 

Cressa was looking back at her, shaking her head vehemently since she supposedly couldn't talk, and Miranda scowled at her. She didn't know who the fuck these people were, or what their deal was, but she wasn't so far gone that she didn't know that Cressa bitch had been lying to her all along. And hadn't the pain in her head gotten worse since she'd known her?  
Cressa scowled back at her, the skank, and looked back at the Aussie. The Aussie looked down at her with a hint of a smile, like she was the funniest form of insect life he had ever seen. 

"You're lucky, Cressa. If Logan was here, I'd have just had him grab you and put those claws of his in your face. Somehow, I don't think you'd be very spunky then. Let her talk, Jean." 

The redhead seemed to relax, dropping her hand to her side, and Cressa shoved herself up to her feet, face contorted in rage. "You stupid fuck, it's too late!" She snapped, almost getting in the pretty boy's face but not quite daring. "The process can't be undone now. So take your little mutant bang buddies and get the fuck out of here before I really lose my temper." 

The wind started kicking up again, but it seemed warmer and nastier this time, charged with ozone. The clouds had turned gunmetal grey too, almost black, and Miranda didn't get how a storm could move in that fast, unless Cressa was doing it somehow. 

The Aussie didn't seem impressed. In fact, he gave her a toothy grin that was almost a leer. "Last chance, Zayrith. Let the girl go and revert to form - I'll send you to a dimension where you can be a slave driver or an overseer. I know you'll get off on that." 

"Go fuck yourself, Drai'shajan." 

Was that his name? Weird name. 

"Jean, remember you have to hold me in place until this is all over," the guy said, looking at Cressa but talking to the leather girl. 

Cressa scoffed. "Hold you? What, you really that worried about me kicking your butt?" 

"No, I'm worried about the lightning bolt." 

"What?" 

The guy grabbed Cressa's upper arms firmly, and shouted,"Now!" For a millisecond, Miranda was sure she'd seen his eyes turn completely blue, whites and all, and saw blue energy outlining his fingers on Cressa's arms as she went suddenly rigid, like someone had shoved a pole up her ass. 

But it happened so quick she was never sure. Because then a lightning bolt came out of the sky and hit Cressa straight on the top of her head, and laser beam guy fired, a continuous stream of red energy that hit Cressa full on her back. 

Miranda didn't know what they were doing, or how Cressa hadn't burst into flames or blown up into a million pieces. 

Before she could consider it for too long, it felt like something twisted deep inside her brain, sending out a deep, sharp pain that was both icy and unbearably hot, and finally her consciousness ebbed away with the pain. 

** 

    It all happened within a space of seconds, but it seemed to be the longest few seconds of Jean's life. Well, up to that moment in time. 

According to Bob, this all had a background in the same physics he had mentioned to Ororo: they'd overwhelm the Zayrith with energy. He'd pump it full of psychic energy, while Ororo and Scott would hit it with more 'conventional' energy, and it would, in Bob's words "make her pop like a tick too full of blood". Wonderful imagery. 

Follow the law of physics that says energy can't be destroyed, Bob figured the Zayrith would be, but the energy she stole from Miranda would go back to its source - Miranda. But he still couldn't offer any guarantee that she'd survive it. As he said a possibility that she would was better than the certainty that she wouldn't. There was no other way to destroy the Zayrith without killing Miranda. 

It was hard to hold Bob in place - since he was holding on to Cressa, who was the brunt of it, the electricity was traveling through him too ( Bob had told Ororo not to worry about holding back, as electricity couldn't kill him) - but after several interminable seconds, Cressa did something weird. She exploded. 

Well, not in a conventional sense. She appeared to be almost see through, as if bathed in x - rays, then turned into a figure of golden light that burst like a star and dissipated violently, as if torn up by the wind. 

Storm and Scott both stopped their attacks, and she let go of Bob, only to see him flung backwards about twenty feet. He landed flat on his back, sprawled on the ground, smoking slightly, and not moving at all. 

"Shit," she muttered to herself, wondering how damaged he could be. He never said it couldn't hurt him, only that it couldn't kill him, a strange parsing of consequences that Bob must have picked up from Logan. Or maybe that was just something they had in common. 

As she approached Bob, Tanith stood up, no longer using her powers since they were no longer needed.  "Oh god, Bob! Is he all right?" 

"I'm sure he is," Jean lied, seeing no point in worrying the girl. She was already deathly pale, a stricken expression on her face. "He said he could take it." 

She remembered she couldn't touch him, so she crouched beside him. He was smoking, all right, and most of his shirt had burned away; she could smell charred leather too. But he wasn't burned, not in the conventional sense, not like Humans. His skin was cracked open, like arid desert sand, cobalt blood oozing from the tiny fissures on his torso, arms, neck, and face. And for some reason, his hair was now completely golden blond (and smoking, but not burned). 

"Oh Christ," Tanith said, kneeling on the other side of him. "Is his blood supposed to be that color?" 

Oh shit. How did she explain that? "I've never seen it in another shade," she admitted. 

It looked like Bob was breathing ( did Bob need to breathe? ), and it seemed his blood was starting to slow, the cuts not exactly healing yet, but clearly getting ready to do so. He didn't heal as quickly or dramatically as Logan, but it was obvious he was just as resilient. 

"He was like her, wasn't he?" Tanith asked. "I mean, not a parasite, but from another dimension, right?" 

She considered lying, but why? They'd lied enough to this poor girl. "Yes. I guess the blood is a giveaway, huh?" 

"Oh no, I already figured he was," she admitted, grimacing in embarrassment. "I mean, he talked about wormholes and portholes to other realities not like he was speculating on them, but like he'd really seen them and been in them. I was always hopin', if I asked nicely, he'd take me through one sometime." 

Tanith smiled shyly, and Jean returned it, proud of her. She always knew she was bright. 

Bob groaned, and moved a limp hand to his forehead. "Who's bakin' snake?" He wondered, covering his face. 

"Snake?" Tanith repeated, not sure if he was joking or not. 

"Yeah. Tasty, makes a great casserole, good source of protein, low in fat. Like me." Bob uncovered his face, and while all the fissures on his face hadn't healed over, he was no longer bleeding. "Oh shit, the smell is me, isn't it?" He propped himself up on his elbows, giving himself the once over, and admitted, with a sly grin, "Hey - I'm the other white meat. Who knew?" 

Tanith giggled, and Jean knew Bob was fine. He was already cracking jokes and charming the girls. 

She stood, and looked back towards Scott, only to see him gently shaking Miranda's shoulders, trying to get her to come to. Oh no. 

She quickly joined him, and without a word he moved aside and let her take over. "Miranda? Can you hear me?" She asked, prying her eyelid open. The eyes had rolled back into her head, exposing only the whites. At best, she was unconscious; at worst, she was comatose. 

"Will she be all right?" Ororo asked, coming up beside them. 

Jean shook her head. "I don't know. We need to get her back to the mansion, I'll see what I can do for her there." She was still alive, so that was something. Maybe they could do something to help her. 

But even as she began to strategize about Miranda's treatment, she couldn't help but wonder where Logan was, and if he was this bad off. 

    14 

    " - you can't place faith in human beings, human beings are unreliable things," Heydon sang along with the industrial band as he entered the club, but the sound system was so loud he couldn't even hear himself. But that was okay, as he really didn't know what kind of voice Logan had as a singer. He was probably flat and tone deaf. 

No matter that it was still sunny outside - in the club Halcyon it was night, the bloody red and gang - green neon lights pulsing from the ceiling and highlighting the wrought iron chairs and railings and faux marble floors that were this place's lame attempts at gothicism. 

He shouldered his way through the poseurs to the polished ebony bar, where a sleek looking Hispanic bartender held down the fort, with enough facial piercings that he could probably be terminally snagged by a thrown knitted afghan. Heydon ordered a whiskey straight, and glanced around at the mingling people and the dancers writhing as best they could to the grinding industrial music. They were mostly young - ish (twenties ) and Human, although there were a few other demons, like him, looking for some hot, fresh prey. 

Logan was still locked up in some dark corner of broken mind,a wounded animal licking his wounds, and Heydon was content to leave him there for now. But he decided when he was about to make his kill he'd drag him out kicking and screaming, so he got to watch and enjoy as he fed. Probably make a pseudo - good guy go fucking nuts. Which was the point, of course - torture didn't always have to be physical. 

He had just started nursing his drink when he got a sense of vampires near him. 

"Hello - " 

" - big - " 

" - guy. You're - " 

" - an Auhminra - " 

" - aren't you? " 


	8. Part 8

The vamps flanked him, one on either side. They were identical twin teenage girls, with their brown hair pulled back in identical French knots, but what gave away their identities were their matching odd eyes: one silver grey, one hazel gold. They could only be the famed Weird Sisters, vampiric twins that were probably demon hybrids of some sort, seemingly connected at the brain stem. He heard of them, but never encountered them. Who knew they hung in Los Angeles now?"I am. And you're the Weirds. Which one of you is which?" 

"We - " 

" - are - " 

" - us. " They said, volleying the words back and forth with perfect timing. As old as they were, they must have worked all the bugs out of the act long ago. 

He nodded, and took a gulp of his drink. "So what are you girls do here. Is the hunting good?" 

"Not - " 

" - really -" 

" - it's just - " 

" - on the - " 

" - main sewer line." 

Heydon nodded, wondering if they sensed Logan at all. Supposedly they were capable of some telepathy. He noticed they didn't have glasses with them. "Buy you girls a drink?" 

"They - " 

" - don't - " 

" - serve blood - " 

" - here." 

"Bummer. You'd think, being on the main sewer line, the management would wise up." 

"Humans," they said as one, both rolling their eyes in perfect synchronicity. Okay, now that was starting to get creepy. 

He knew they were supposed to be more dangerous than your average vamps, mainly because of their weirdo link. And while the stereo talking was annoying, they were kind of cute, and it might be something to see them in action. "You know your way around the city?" 

"Of -" 

" - course. " 

"I'm kind of new here." A lie, but what the hell? "What's say I finish my drink and you gals take me on a hunting tour?" With them, he'd probably get premium souls, and more than just some tart here and there. And watching some vamps kill would probably put Logan right over the bend. 

The Sisters exchanged looks best described as leary, then said, "Hunting - " 

" - with - " 

" - a soul - " 

" - eater is - " 

" - no fun. We - " 

" - don't want leftovers. " 

He shrugged, and wondered what a threesome with them would be like. Oh sure, vampires were always cold fucks, but they could be fun. "I'll kill my own, you kill your own. We'll leave the leftovers for the Slime demons." 

They seemed to consider that a moment, and he finished off his drink, catching the reflection of the writhing bodies on the dance floor in the crackled mirror behind the bar. He couldn't see the Sisters, of course, but he had a wonderfully unobstructed view of the dance floor. Along with the music, he murmured,"I'm the new way to go. I'm the way of the future." 

And it was amazing how his future unfurled before him, so bright and so long. He used to worry about finding suitable hosts, one who might hold out for a little longer than most, and the sheer constant battle of him had worn him down. Why should he have to worry about such idiocy and the fragility of Human flesh when so many lesser demons didn't? 

But now he never had to worry about it again. How ironic that he had found a permanent home in Nomad. 

** 

    Miranda was comatose, and even the Professor had been unable to reach her conscious mind. 

According to Jean, there had been some damage to a part of the frontal lobe that was associated with psychic abilities in mutants. Since little was known about that area, she couldn't say how bad it really was, or how permanent, not until she woke up. Bob seemed to think he could go into her mind and find her, but only when she was a bit stronger. Whatever that meant. 

Conveniently his cell phone rang and he left the med lab, and Scott leaned against the wall, wondering if there was another way. Some way where Miranda wouldn't have gotten so badly hurt. 

Of course, how could they know?Whatever Cressa was, she was clearly playing by her own rules - like Bob. Funny how it always worked out that way. 

Jean and the Professor were studying Miranda's brain scans once more when Bob came back into the room, pumping his fist in the air like a truck driver yanking on his air horn cord. "Woohoo! We have a score." 

They all looked at him curiously, Jean letting her red rimmed glasses fall to the bridge of her nose as she gazed at him quizzically. "What do you mean?" 

"The Sisters have Heydon. They found him scoping prey in a nightclub." 

"They captured him?" She replied, trying to keep the relief from her voice. 

Bob shook his head. His hair was a little browner now, and the change had happened so suddenly no one had noticed. How'd he do that with his hair?"No. They can't really hurt him without killing Logan, so they're simply tagging along with him, but believe me, that's good. We'll always know where to find him, so we can plan a course of action." 

"What if he loses them?" Scott asked. 

Bob shook his head, more vehemently this time. "When the Sisters are looking for you, consider yourself found." He paused, then added, "They're some of those vampires you refuse to believe in, you know. So was Moira, although she wasn't nearly as gifted." 

This was the resumption of an old argument. "Look, I just have a problem with the whole Dracula thing, all right? It doesn't seem real." 

"Well, most of that stuff about Drac ain't true," he conceded. 

"Most?" Was he pulling his leg? 

"I know the Sisters are psychic," Xavier said, looking at Bob, a hint of pain making crinkles appear in the corners of his eyes. "Did they get any sense of Logan at all?" 

Bob grimaced, and Scott once again wondered how old he was. His face seemed strangely ageless in a truly undefinable way, and every now and then it bothered him. "No. They knew it was Logan they saw, but they also knew he smelled wrong, and when they got close all they could pick up was Heydon. He must be submerged." 

"What does that mean?" Jean asked, turning away to remove the MRIs from the reader board. He could still hear the concern and disappointment in her voice. 

"Could mean a number of things. Could mean he's out cold, or shoved so far back in his own mind he can't get out until Heydon lets him out. Or, Logan himself could be hunting." 

"What do you mean?" Jean asked, still keeping busy with the scans. 

"I know he's kind of impatient, but when he's got a goal, he can be remarkably focused and patient. He could be conserving his energies and waiting for a chance to strike back again. He'll probably just have the one shot, so he'll want to make it count." 

"What can he do?" 

Bob shrugged expansively. "I'm not sure. But Logan surprised him once; I have faith he can do it again." 

"To what end?" Scott interjected. "He can't beat him. It's an empty gesture." 

"Possibly, but maybe not. Resistance, no matter how futile, is never an empty gesture mate. It's a declaration of intention - it means you are not going quietly." 

"I don't think Logan could ever go quietly, even to the store." Jean gave him a dirty look for the joke, but Bob chuckled. 

"That's good. You should tell him that when he gets back - he'll like that." 

Jean turned to face Bob, not even trying to hide the hope in her expression. For some reason, it made Scott feel vaguely ill. "You think we'll get him back?" 

"I know we will." 

"How do we know Heydon isn't toying with us?" Scott argued. He crossed his arms over his chest, and just felt belligerant. "Logan knows the Sisters. How come Heydon didn't recognize them?" 

"Logan's mind is a bit of a crazy quilt - it's not that easy to find what you need when you need it. And I imagine that whatever Heydon did to punish him has made the situation worse." 

Jean's face paled, and Scott rather wished he'd left the 'punishment' part out. Before she could ask what he thought Heydon had done to him, Bob added, "But this works for us, believe it or not.  Heydon's such an arrogant prick he thinks he doesn't need any of Logan's memories, or, in spite of the scrambling and memory gaps, he can find what he needs when he needs it. Wouldn't you love to be that full of yourself?" He then looked at him askance, and with a wink said, "Very funny, mate." Scott stared at him in shock, as Jean looked at him in surprise. He hadn't said anything! Well, he had been thinking Bob should talk ... 

"And I know from experience that being Logan is more complicated than it seems, " Bob went on, as if he hadn't just read his mind. "Those claws are more difficult than they look; there's a trick to 'em." 

"How are we going to get Heydon out without hurting Logan?" The Professor wondered. 

Bob grimaced, and Scott knew the news was bad. Funny how he hardly felt bad about it. "I don't think there's any way to get Heydon without hurting Logan. But hurt is better than kill." 

Scott almost said it - "Is it always?" - but kept it to himself. It was bad enough that Bob knew he thought it. 

    15 

    Logan had no idea where he was, but it was obvious his situation hadn't improved much. Well, at least not internally. 

He was sitting in the center of what must have been a dojo, with thin rice paper walls, and hardwood floors sporadically covered by thin mats that were more for traction than comfort, but when he slid aside a door to look out, he saw not Japan but Canada. 

Although the towering pine forest could have belonged to the mountainous foothills of Japan, he thought he recognized the peaks with their thick snowcaps - barely visible between the thick netting of branches - as part of the Canadian Rockies. So his mind was still a fucking mess, slamming together recollections with a randomness that suggested his mind had been through a blender. 

Well, he'd had worse. No, probably not, but he was trying to keep his spirits up. 

Weirder still, it was warm in the dojo, sunlight making the rice paper walls gleam like snowshine, but in Canada it was hours before dawn, the sky turning violet and washing away the stars one by one. It was so frosty a spider web on the porch (since when did dojos have porches?) looked like a stretched out snowflake, the strands so encrusted with ice he was sure it would shatter as soon as the breeze hit it. 

He found himself wearing loose white pants and shirtless, although an open white tunic and black sash were spread out on a black mat several meters away from him. He was barefoot too, which convinced him these were martial arts clothes, the kind you wore when practicing, but since he had no memory of ever having any martial arts training, he wondered how accurate this was. Of course the problem was while he didn't remember any training, he still had the skills, and must have learned it - several different types - at some point in his life. But when, why and how come he could recall the moves when he couldn't recall the actual learning of them were the nagging questions.  Also, there was the language thing - how come he knew so many goddamn languages without being aware he knew them?   
"Perhaps you were a spy," Xavier had suggested, mostly joking. 

But Logan was growing more and more convinced it really wasn't a joke at all. It would explain an awful lot. 

He got up and paced, but he was alone here, no more representations of himself or his fractured mind popping up; maybe that was a blessing. But in a way it wasn't, because he still had no idea what he was going to do. 

He went over and picked up the tunic, deciding it was probably too cold to risk going outside without a shirt (it was bad enough he'd have to go out barefoot, although he knew he could never get frostbite), when he heard a familiar voice say, "Bein' a magnet for freaky shit gets wearing, doesn't it?" 

He could swear he felt his heart skip a beat as he pivoted to see Bob standing near the doorway, leaning back against it as if casually awaiting the next bus. "Bob? Are you actually here?" 

He shook his head. "Sorry to get your hopes up, mate." 

He should have guessed if Bob could show up he would have sooner. This was just another personality/memory fragment. But it brought up something he hadn't considered before. "Hey - is some of your energy still left in my mind?" 

Bob had to consider that, cocking his head to the side and straightening up, shoving himself off the wall with his shoulder blades and somehow not ripping the paper. Bob was still talented, even here.  "I don't think so." 

"Damn." 

"But you should be goin' after him, not me. You got him once." 

Logan sat back down on the floor, still feeling enervated. But at least he could move now - that had to be some kind of victory. "A lucky shot, and I'm sure Chuck and Jeannie puttin' the hurt on him helped immensely." 

Bob came over and hunkered down in front of him. He was wearing what Logan had come to think of as his uniform - the black leather pants, the biker boots, the skintight t-shirt (this time white). "Maybe. But I think you can do this. You're gettin' stronger all the time, aren't you?" 

He shrugged. "I don't know." 

"Trust me, you are. And bein' here is no coincidence. What do all martial arts have in common?" 

Logan glared at him. "Tell me. I don't have time for twenty questions." 

"Hey, I got all day." 

He scowled at him. Even here, he was a bastard. "The pajamas?" 

"Cute, but not what I'm goin' for." 

It was so unfair that Bob was still playing games in his own mind. "Discipline?" 

"Woohoo, we have a winner! Yes, exactly." 

He stared at the pseudo -Bob, wondering if he could punch him, and if it would do any good. "How the fuck does that help me?!" 

"Well, a lot of that discipline is expressed as meditation. Meditation teaches you to connect to all aspects of yourself. Now we know that Heydon's gonna expect you to react violently the next time he lets you come out,and he'll be ready. So do the sneaky thing." 

"What's the sneaky thing?" 

"If frontal assault doesn't work, what's the next option?" 

He felt like he was being walked through something. "Infiltration." 

Bob pointed at him and nodded. But Logan continued to stare at him in disbelief. "How do I infiltrate my own mind? I'm already here." 

"Not your mind - your body." 

"Huh?" 

"He took that away from you, all the control. He expects an attack on the mind. He doesn't expect an attack on the body. He doesn't think you can do it." 

"I can't do it." 

"Yes, you can. Meditation, focus. Reach out to yourself with your mind." 

"What the fuck do you mean?" 

"You know meditation techniques, unconsciously if nothing else. Use them to try and find your center." 

"Since when do you use New Age psychobabble?" He snapped, really considering the beating now. 

"It's there, Logan. Defeat him by taking your control back." 

He rolled his eyes. "So  I regain control of my toes. How the fuck does that help me?" 

Bob clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Be patient, mate. We're comin' for ya, you know that. And working together, we can kick this fucker's ass." 

"We'd better. My mind is so fucked I can't imagine living here the rest of my life." 

Even as he said it, the irony didn't escape Logan. 

** 

    The Weird Sisters really lived up to their name. 

They didn't want to 'prowl' for prey - what they wanted to do was wait and hit a rave. Apparently there was an illegal but well known rave going down tonight at a warehouse on Pacific and 53rd, and the Sisters were hot to hit it. They loved raves. Or, more accurately, they loved the bad lighting and heavy drug use,  which meant they could kill up to a dozen people without anyone actually noticing. The drugs and alcohol in the blood was just an added 'bonus'.  
He decided to take their word on that. 

But a bunch of fine young things sounded like a damn good meal, and since it was now dusk, they could walk the streets and he didn't have to tromp through the foul smelling sewer. With Logan's hyper acute nose, he bet it would be a real trial. 

The Sisters had a tendency to disappear and reappear in the shadows before him, like they were wraiths as opposed to vampires. They never seemed to get farther than twenty feet from each other, even though one might disappear from sight. He wished he knew how they thought; he couldn't even imagine. 

Heydon was surprised that Logan hadn't tried something, no matter how futile and stupid - after all, those seemed to be his middle name - but he still seemed to be withdrawn deeply, perhaps licking his wounds. Stupid animal. He wished he could have the Sisters explain to him that weaker species had no chance against a superior species, but if the moron hadn't learned that by now, he was never going to know. 

He'd been hoping to grab a snack on the way, but so far he had yet to encounter any Humans at all. Was it the Sister's shortcut, or were the Sisters themselves scaring off any Humans who got near? Or worse - snacking on them themselves and hiding the bodies? They were in and out of the shadows so much he knew it was a possibility.  
So he tried to sniff out any blood, and watched them as carefully as he could. 

If he discovered they were lying to him, he'd see how well Logan's claws worked on vampires. 

    16 

    Scott knew things were bad the instant he smelled the garbage. 

Bob had transported them - himself, Jean, Storm - into an alley filled with overflowing, fetid dumpsters, and what smelled like the emptied contents of a really filthy men's room. 

"Oh Jesus," Scott exclaimed, immediately pressing a hand to his nose. He never smelled anything that made him feel like losing his lunch, but this was skirting the line. "You had to bring us here?" 

"The Sisters told me they were bringing him here," Bob said, as if that explained everything. 

"To a stinky alley?" Jean said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. 

There was a noise in the nearest dumpster, and as they turned towards it, a ratty old tom cat with one and a half ears peered at them over the edge. It was orange and white and mangy, looking more like an overgrown rat than a cat. 

It looked like it started to hiss, but then it stopped, and Bob held his arms out towards it. "Come on, moggy, we're friends." 

To Scott's disbelief, the tom tamely jumped in Bob's arms, and he held the smelly cat to his chest and petted its matted, slimed fur as he explained to them, "No, to a waste treatment plant off Pacific. Weird shit happens here all the time, and no one notices or cares." 

The cat was purring contentedly, loud enough that they could all hear it. It had a big, ugly gash on its left rear leg that looked swollen with infection, but it didn't seem to mind Bob touching it. 

"You affect cats too?" Storm asked in surprise. 

Bob just shrugged. "What can I say? Animals love me." 

"What exactly is the plan?" Scott asked, hoping to catch him off guard. 

"You know - knock him out. I'll take care of the rest." 

"What is 'the rest' exactly?" Scott wondered. 

"Believe me, I can't explain it. You're just gonna have to trust me." 

"Famous last words," Scott muttered. He really didn't like not knowing what Bob was up to. But did they ever know for sure? 

"I thought you couldn't effect Heydon," Jean said, trying to coax something out of him. 

"Not in a conventional sense, no." 

"So an energy overload won't work here," Storm said, sounding disappointed. 

"No. But I got a secret weapon he can't do anything about." 

"Oh no - that fly guy isn't back, is he?" Scott looked around, checking the rooftops of the brick buildings that made up the alley. Beyond its narrow corridor he could see a huge warehouse type building about thirty meters away across rutted blacktop, all surrounded by a high chain link fence topped with barbed wire, and large 'No Trespassing' signs posted every three meters or so. "Lot of people want to break into the waste treatment plant?" He thought aloud. 

Bob shook his head, and crouched down to let go of the cat. "Nah, but some Frenik demons did try and raise a Hellgod here a couple of years ago. It didn't go very well." The cat hopped out of Bob's arms and walked confidently away, tail held high, and Scott almost did a double take. The cat no longer had an injured back leg. 

"Whoa," he said, pointing. It took him a moment to spit the words out, because the whole thing seemed so absurd. "Did you just heal that cat?" 

Both Jean and Storm looked after the cat as it disappeared around the corner. "It's a strange world, Scott," he said, giving him a shit eating grin. It was no answer at all, and they all knew it, but Scott also knew that was as close to an answer that he'd ever get from Bob. 

Infuriating man. He didn't know whether to be angry, insulted, or afraid. Or all of the above. 

** 

    Heydon knew something was wrong the instant they turned onto the corner of Pacific Avenue. 

The smell emanating from the waste treatment plant was bad enough: to Logan's nose, it was like a fermenting landfill in a septic tank. But the weather had taken on an abrupt shift, dark clouds foaming in the sky like water boiling in a pot, sheltering the moon from view, and he could smell the ozone in spite of the overwhelming shit stink of the quiet, darkened block. A big electrical storm was brewing, but it was far from natural. 

"Somebody's using magicks," he said, glancing around the block. With the reek and the ozone, it was hard to pick anything up by scent, and he had yet to see anything with his eyes. 

The Weird Sisters, back together as a team, stopped in the middle of the empty street about twenty feet away and turned to face him, leering smiles on the pale faces. 

"Not - " 

" - magic -" 

"- we don't - " 

" - feel it." 

He gestured violently to the sky. "Explain this then." 

"We - " 

" - can't." 

"But he -" 

" - can." 

The Sisters suddenly moved aside, and  the Drai' shajan appeared between them, like a game show host after the hostesses have pulled open the curtains. "Heydon, bubula!" Bob said, with the same kind of phony emcee warmth. 

"You weren't gonna leave without saying goodbye, were you?" 

Heydon leered back at him, and said, "Think I wasn't prepared for you, exile?" And he shouted the incantation as several things occurred simultaneously: a lightning bolt came straight out of the sky towards him, like Logan's adamantium skeleton had made him a lightning rod; some guy across the street on the right shot a red beam of phased energy straight towards him; and on the left, the luscious Red sent out a telekinetic wave straight for him. 

"Shit, no!" Bob shouted, recognizing the incantation, but it was too late. 

All the energy hit the invisible outer envelope around him, and bounced right back towards the senders. They didn't call it a 'rebound' spell for nothing. 

Whoever lightning lady was, she let out a satisfying cry of pain as the lightning bolt hit her square on and made her collapse on the roof of a building at the end of the block. Red didn't have much time to make a noise as her own telekinesis hit her straight on and sent her flying out of view, but the guy who shot at him yelped as he was thrown off his feet by his own energy beam and flew into the alley as boneless as a rag doll. 

He was now alone with Bob, as the Sisters had departed. Apparently, they knew a losing side when they saw it. 

"At what point did you think you were dealing with an amateur?" Heydon asked coolly.  Did he just get cocky, or was age getting to old Bob? 

Bob glowered at him, eyes almost glowing in the imposed pitch blackness. " You modified it to work on mutants, huh?" 

"Had to. Logan's one, was he not?" 

"Is. He's not dead, and I heard he hurt you." 

Heydon scoffed and rolled his eyes. "No, not really. I think old Baldy hurt me more, although it was a temporary thing. Where is he? Can I expect him to wheel up any second?" He chuckled at his own mental image of that. Oh sure, he appeared perfectly functional on the mindscape, but Heydon had picked up the knowledge of his paralysis from his own mind. What a terrible irony - a magnificent, powerful brain trapped in a shattered and worthless body. Well, for now. Heydon was planning to put him out of his misery. 

"You really get your rocks off on stuff like this, don't you?" 

"Bob  - shouldn't you know better? On this dimension, we're just about even. All you can do is piss me off." 

"Are you sure about that?" 

It was then that he felt something - no, somethings, two - hit him hard on the back of the head. In spite of Logan's adamantium lined skull, the blow caused stars to explode before his eyes, and he stumbled forward, not quite falling but almost. 

"Spell - " 

" - doesn't -" 

" - work on - " 

" - us. We're - " 

" - not using powers." The Sisters said, as they spun into perfectly synchronized side kicks, both catching him on opposite sides of the face. 

Another bone jarring blow, and he was pretty sure he heard the Sisters boot heels crack under the strain of impacting adamantium so hard, but still he staggered back. They were vampire/demon hybrids, and pain just didn't mean a lot to them. 

He shouted a spell for repulsing vampires, and as they moved in for another hit they were thrown back violently, causing them to both sprawl back first on the street. The spell didn't make exceptions for half breeds. 

"You use vampires to do your dirty work?" He shouted at Bob, wiping away a trickle of blood from his nostril. "Blood sucking killers? That's not very humane, is it?" 

He was suddenly aware someone was beside him when he felt a kick in the back of the knee that sent him crashing down to one shin on the street. When he turned to see who it was, he got a knee right in the face, one that shattered Logan's nose like an icicle. 

He had expected Bob, and was surprised to see it was the guy Logan thought of as 'The Boy Scout' - Scott. "I can't tell you how long I've been waiting to do this," he snarled, giving him a seriously hard kick in the stomach. 

Thanks to Logan's nose, he could smell the adrenaline coming off of him, mostly anger but some pain, and Heydon wondered if he was actually beating on him for sending his beam back in his face, or beating on Logan over Red.  
Yes, he had picked that up too. 

Perhaps fucking a doctor had certain privileges, because he was going for all the non - adamantium parts: the nose, the stomach, and now he was hammering painful punches, one right after another, into his ear. Fuck, that hurt. 

And, as it turned out, Logan's body had a nasty shock of its own: healing kind of hurt. It was like a low fire spread by a multitude of fast moving insects under the skin, and while it was more unpleasant than genuinely painful, he really didn't like it. It didn't seem fair somehow. 

Heydon tired of Scott's attempts at machismo. He blocked an incoming blow with his forearm, and with his other punched the little son of a bitch straight in the balls. Because he was on the street and at an odd angle, the blow was glancing, but considering Logan had an adamantium bolstered fist, that was more than enough. 

Scott lost all his breath in a huff, and staggered, barely staying on his feet as he doubled over, and Heydon was surprised he hadn't thrown up. No matter what he lacked in the balls department, that had to hurt. 

"You're not the only one who's been waiting a long time for this," Heydon pointed out, getting up to his feet.  He then backhanded him across the face, hard enough to split his lip open and maybe loosen some teeth, but not hard enough to knock him out. Oh no - he wanted him conscious for this. "But me? I don't really care. Still, always happy to kill." 

He popped the claws on Logan's right hand, and gave Scott a solid jab in the stomach that would eviscerate him like a slaughterhouse pig. 

Except something went wrong. 

He felt the impact, and whatever air Scott had left in his lungs left in a rush, but there was no torn skin, no smell of blood, and as he withdrew his fist, he saw his claws had retracted into his hand. When the hell had that happened?He just didn't have the hang of Logan's claws. 

Instead Heydon gave him an uppercut that snapped his head back violently, and as he staggered back, he hit him flush in the center of the face, shattering his nose and cracking his visor, which went flying as soon as he hit the concrete like a ton of raw beef.  "There's a lesson here for you, Scotty," he said, aware he was probably too unconscious hear, but did you ever know for sure? "Never pick a fight with a powerful demon, or the professional bare knuckle boxer with the metal skeleton. No real way to win there." 

"But even Logan would tell you that's no guarantee of success," Bob said, and as he turned to face him, he shot him right in the head. 

The bullet bounced off the metal underneath the skin of Logan's forehead, but it was like a donkey kick straight to the temple, and he staggered back, almost collapsing. "What the fuck is this shit?" He growled. "You know bullets can't hurt me or him." 

"Actually, funny thing about these bullets - they've got adamantium jackets. So, unlike plain old soft metal bullets, they hurt Logan like flamin' hell." He fired again, hitting another bull's eye on his forehead, and he would swear his head rang like a fucking gong. 

He tried to stand up, get up off his one knee, but he couldn't seem to move, and the next bullet knocked him onto his ass. Blood trickled down into his eyes from the new skin tear on his brow, and in a pause in the shooting, he looked up in time to have Bob's blood splatter his face, and he shouted an incantation that he almost recognized, and Bob's blood - deliberately splattered on him from a cut on his palm - felt like it was starting to burn on his skin. 

"The spell is off," Bob announced, and then shot him once more in the head, making the view skew sideways, colors bleeding out of the dim landscape. "Logan, are you there? Can you get through?" 

Heydon thought that was a weird non - sequitur, but then he began to realize that his hand was moving, but he hadn't moved it. He could not feel that hand. 

Bob shot him again, and as his consciousness reeled, he felt a surge of something else in his mind. 

No. This was not happening. 

** 

    It was weird to think that terrible pain would be a sort of salvation. 

But it was. Logan could distantly feel the adamantium jacketed bullets slam into his skull, and it was only when it really started to piss him off that he realized he was starting to feel his body again. 

For the longest time, he had concentrated on trying to get some sense of himself, and only knew he had regained some control when he felt his claws pop out of his hand. And that really pissed him off - no one used his claws but him, and it didn't matter that it was Scott who was the intended victim of the skewering. 

His claws, not Heydon's. He was probably more surprised than the demon when it actually worked and he retracted them, then even more so that Heydon seemed completely unaware of what had happened. He hadn't noticed Logan was taking his body back piece by piece. 

Then when Bob started to shoot him, it made things harder, but quickly became easier, as it seemed to be threatening Heydon's grip on his mind as his consciousness wavered. Logan could feel the pain, but it just added to his rage, and as always that seemed to help him focus. 

Although he was still hearing things as if from deep underwater ( the gunshots couldn't help ), he managed to swallow, remember how exactly he worked his vocal chords, and said, "Empty the clip! He's fading out." 

Bob shook his head, although Logan could barely see him out his own eyes. It was like he was peering through windows at another room, and deeply fucking disturbing,  just because it proved Heydon was still hanging on. 


	9. Part 9

"I can't - it's empty." he replied, and although he seemed like the outline of a dark figure on an even darker background, Logan thought he saw Bob eject the ammo clip from the butt of the gun and turn it upside down before dropping it to the street. He heard the noise very distantly, like the clatter of a fork on a dining room floor, but he didn't see it. 

There was more darkness creeping into the edge of his  vision, but it wasn't his consciousness falling away - it was Heydon, reasserting control. "Do something, the fucker's coming back!" 

Bob holstered the useless gun, and said, "You know this isn't personal, Logan." 

"What?" 

He tried to move, but found himself frozen as Heydon seemed to be taking him back, and worst of all was the fact that this was a battle he couldn't fight. He was lucky to have come out for a moment, and now his time was about over. 

Logan did hear some sort of noise off to his right, and was able to sort of move his head, although he felt like a parakeet with a stiff neck. It was Scott, rising to his hands and knees with his eyes tightly shut, groping blindly on the street for his visor. His nose was swollen and gushing blood, clearly broken, and it looked like some blood was trickling out of his mouth, the lower lip split and starting to swell. Even without his claws, Heydon had smacked his ass down but good. 

And even as he lost what little feeling he had in his body, Logan realized that Scott, although several feet away, was now parallel to him. 

"Scott," he shouted, sure he would lose his voice any second now. "Shoot me!" 

Scott paused, temporarily stopping his search for his visor. 

"Goddamn it, focus on the direction of my voice and fucking shoot me!" Logan could feel himself slipping away inside his own mind, something far worse than mere unconsciousness: he could feel Heydon reasserting himself, a dark force that seemed to be crushing his brain like a bug. He knew if he could feel all the pain, he'd have been gone before now. "Open your goddamn eyes, Scott! Look at me!" 

But it was too late. His vision faded to black, but was not completely gone before he thought he saw a sudden glimmer of red light. Even before he got a sense of the impact slamming into him, Logan knew that Scott had finally opened his eyes. 

    17 

    It seemed pretty obvious Scott didn't just wear the headgear so he could look at things without blowing them up - the visor, dorky as it was, allowed him to modulate the force he used. Because otherwise he was full on all the time. And Bob had to admit full on was pretty damn impressive. 

When Scott turned to Logan and opened his eyes, Bob actually had to stagger back a step to avoid the backwash of the energy that seemed to hit Logan square in the face. It sent him flying, as weightless as a kite, and Logan didn't just slam into the building across the street, he rammed clear through it, taking most of the remaining facade with him. 

Scott shut his eyes tight before he collapsed the entire building on top of him (although he might have to), and Bob was already racing towards the thrown Logan/Heydon as he heard Jean exclaim in horror, "Scott, what have you done?" 

Poor guy. He just couldn't catch a break. 

It was bad enough emptying the remainder of the clip into Logan just to get to Heydon - he just knew this was really going to make him feel bad. 

The building had been previously condemned, and just from the amount of shattered glass and the strong chemical smell, it was easy to guess that this was a former drug house. As Bob stepped through the big hole in the side, avoiding still falling bricks and chunks of ceiling, coughing due to the thick cloud of mortar and plaster dust, he saw that - unbelievable as it was - Logan was starting to stir. Incredible - it just showed how much punishment Logan and Heydon could both take. Scott probably would have to put him through a couple of buildings to keep him down for any length of time. 

Bob approached Logan, who was laying sprawled on his back on top of a large pile of rubble, and he knew it wasn't Logan who was starting to move, groaning in pain and bringing a hand to his face - it was Heydon. And that made it a little easier, although not by much. 

He crouched down beside him, and reached into his boot. 

"You never did say goodbye," Bob noted. 

Heydon removed his hand from his face and opened his eyes, just in time to see Bob drive Bastet's knife straight into Logan's heart. 

He opened his mouth to scream, but all that came out was a sort of squeak as he drove the dagger down to the hilt. His eyes widened to their very limits, orange energy swirling in Logan's irises as the power of the blessed blade cut straight through to the Auhminra. 

Blood filled Logan's mouth, started oozing out the corners as he went limp, eyes wide open and staring up at nothing. 

Bob sighed and closed his eyes, not really wanting to look. It seemed like failure to kill Logan while killing Heydon as well. 

** 

    Logan found himself laying on his back, looking up at a cloudless azure sky, and feeling more relaxed than he had in a long time. 

There was no better place to be relaxed - a secluded, isolated valley in the shadow of Mount Fujiyama, far enough down the slope that it was still warm on this hot summer day. They were technically trespassing: this was part of a huge parcel of land that had been left to a Buddhist monastery by a recently deceased philanthropist, but now the will and land was caught in the hell of litigation limbo, as the man's family - almost all Shintos, just to make the normal family bitchiness that much more contentious - were contesting it on several grounds that seemed frivolous at best. It would surely get tossed out of court, and the Buddhists would get the land, but not until a few million more yen had been spent. But they weren't terribly concerned about it - it was unlikely they'd be caught, and even if it happened, the Yashida name had a lot of power. 

Logan didn't really understand picnics -you eat outdoors where the bugs can get at everything. Why did it matter if you ate in a park or standing outside a phone booth on a street corner?   
Same damn difference. But it seemed to make Mariko happy, so he went along with it - only a sadomasochistic husband wouldn't go out of his way to make the wife happy every now and then. Not that he was miserable, exactly; time alone with Mariko was hardly terrible. 

She was laying beside him, her head resting on his chest, arm around his waist, one leg between his, and judging from her breathing she was starting to fall asleep. He didn't blame her - it was a very warm day, in Japanese terms it was a virtual heat wave, and here it seemed fairly humid. As far as lunch went, they didn't have much - he made his 'famous' fried tomato and cheese sandwiches to bring along ( which she told him sounded disgusting, until she actually had one - now she routinely asked him when he was making them again ), along with some good beer, as neither of them were that hungry. It was just too warm, and that had never been the whole point of this. 

He had made arrangements for them to get away on a day trip to Osaka, and that's where everyone thought they were. But they were always coming here; misdirection was necessary for protection as well as privacy. It was Mariko who had found the place, as she had seen the photos of the property in the office of her lawyer, who was handling the dead man's estate, and he figured out the best way to get here without being observed by anyone ( or at least not many ). Luckily, most of the roads here never joined the main mountain passes, and save for a single battered old Honda, they had been the only car on the road all the way here. 

They were on a patch of wild green grass - nibbled down to an almost lawn like length by all the local fauna - leading to a small, placid pond. The ducks here were so wild that when they arrived they flew off; a couple had subsequently come back, but continued to eye them warily. All around they were surrounded by tall evergreens and dense underbrush - making it to the clearing wasn't easy - and they were very much alone, save for the birds and a fox he could smell hiding in the ground cover close to the forest's edge ( probably after the sandwiches - he'd leave it the crusts ). 

"I don't suppose you could do something to make your pectoral muscles more pillow like, could you?" Mariko mumbled, shifting her head on his chest. 

"I could look into a padded bra," he offered, grinning at his own joke. "Especially if it was still being worn." 

"Ah, so you want me to kick your ass?" She said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. 

"You could be wearing it," he suggested. 

She gently slapped his abdomen. "Oh, so making a small boobs joke, are we?" 

"Absolutely not. I love your boobs." 

As he had hoped, she laughed, and looked up at him. Her hazel eyes were sleepy - a warm day and good beer could do that to you, or so he'd heard - but she was smiling. "You do realize you're just digging yourself into a deeper and deeper hole, don't you?" 

He just shrugged a single shoulder, grinning at her. "I love danger." 

"No, what you love is being an ass," she replied, but she was still smiling, and she snuggled back into his arms, resting her head closer to the center of his chest now. After a moment, during which he snaked his arm around her, resting his hand on the center of her supple back, she asked, "What time is it?" 

"Uh uh darlin', that was part of the deal - no clock watchin'." 

She groaned dramatically. "Did you get me drunk so I'd agree to that?" 

"No. You insisted on that, I think after that whole Suzuki deal, and after Hiro had me out until four in the fucking morning guarding his scrawny ass." 

"Oh, right." 

It seemed lately that circumstances had been conspiring against them, and they'd rarely had any time together. Once in a while, they'd occasionally share a bed, but that was mostly by accident. More often, he'd get to sleep after she was gone, and she'd be going to bed after he left. They were like people sharing a house at the exact same time on alternate schedules. "You bored already?" He wondered. 

"No. Quiet just makes me nervous. I'm used to noise." 

"It's not quiet. There's the birds, the animals in the underbrush, the wind through the trees, the water lapping up against the edge of the embankment. There's always noise. It only goes silent when something terrible happens, and that's probably the only time you notice it. This is just noise you're not accustomed to." 

She raised herself up on her side, propping herself up on her elbow so she could look down at him skeptically, lips twisted in a way that suggested she was trying not to laugh. "Sometimes I forget I'm married to a samurai with the best hearing in the universe." 

"Not just hearing," he replied, continuing to grin. Every now and then, his senses were annoying to her: he knew what a present was by smell ( well, that one time - he pointed out how could you not smell leather, but she still thought he spoiled it ); could tell where she had been the same exact way, as well as what she had for lunch ( she found that particularly annoying, so he never mentioned it, even if she'd obviously been upset and hitting the sake hard ); could always tell where everyone was by hearing, even out in the garden; and one time he told her she had a cold before she started coming down with symptoms - was it his fault he could smell it on her skin? Apparently, according to her, yes. The samurai thing only bothered her when he remained unflappable in a situation where she felt he should have been ... well, flapping out. 

She scowled comically at him, sliding her other hand up his stomach to his chest, where she ran a finger underneath the collar of his t - shirt. "You are a strange man." 

"I'm a mutant freak." 

Her scowl became deep and genuine. "Would you stop that? I can't tell you how tempted I am to kick your teeth in for calling yourself that." 

"I am a mutant, Riko." 

"But not a freak. You want a freak? Have you seen my Uncle Toshi?" 

He smiled faintly, aware she was just being kind ( although she had a point about Toshi ...). "I'm cool with it, hon. Can't change what you are, can you?" 

She glared at him with narrowed eyes, and he wondered how deep the shit he was in was. She grabbed a fistful of his shirt, and leaned in close to look him straight in the eye. "Do I look like the type of woman who would marry a freak?" 

She had him there. "No." 

"See? Now you're going to knock that shit off before I smack you, right?" 

"Yes dear." He tried hard to swallow the smile, but the more you tried to suppress the thing the more it wanted to come out. 

She saw it and frowned at him, but he saw the humorous sparkle in her eyes before her lips twisted up into a reluctant smile. "You really are an asshole sometimes, you know that?" 

"A world class one," he happily agreed. Well, he couldn't change what he was, could he? 

"Only you would be proud of that," she sighed, then kissed him. Her mouth tasted of beer and salt, and it wasn't unpleasant. He slid his hand under her thin shell of a tank top, and felt beads of sweat on her back, in the small depression of her spine. 

Her hands roamed over his chest, pulling up his shirt, and when she pushed herself away from him, she said, "It's too hot to fool around. What say we go skinny dipping?" 

He grinned up at her. "You should drink beer more often." 

"Ha." She got up, and started walking down towards the pond. The few remaining ducks took flight in a violent burst, becoming a blur of feathers that left ripples on the surface of the water.  
She'd already taken off her shoes earlier, so she could feel the grass between her toes, and as she went down to the edge, she pulled her lavender silk tank top over her head. She then looked between it and the ground, obviously considering the ramifications of leaving silk on the grass, but then she shrugged and said, "Oh, fuck it," dropping it to the ground. What good was having the Yashida name if you couldn't afford dry cleaning? 

He slowly got to his feet, only now aware that the heat had been starting to put him to sleep as well, and peeled off his t - shirt, letting it fall to the grass. Well, it was only cotton, and dark green on top of that - who cared about grass stains? 

She looked towards him, now wearing only her strapless black lace bra and slim black skirt, and she looked so vulnerable - so small and fragile - that he felt his stomach twist. God, how he wished he could give her some of his immunity, or just surround her somehow, pull her inside of him and keep her safe. There were so many dangers in this world, and it terrified him that he might not be able to protect her from all of it. 

If anything ever happened to her, it would kill him. 

She smiled slyly at him, eying him with appreciation. "You know, for a guy, you look really good naked." 

"Jeeze, is that a compliment or not?" He asked, walking down to the pond. He then wondered, "How many guys have you seen naked?" 

"Counting the entire UCLA men's volleyball team?" She grinned at him, a mischievous twinkle in her eye. 

"Oh, everybody's seen them naked, the sun bleached little sluts." 

She laughed, and when he came up to her, she threw her arms around his neck, and smiled up at him. "Have I ever told you how much I love your sense of humor?" 

"I have one?" He asked, pretending to be baffled. But he couldn't help but return her infectious smile, and hoped the fact that he was still frightened for her, for them, didn't show on his face. "I love you." 

Her smile seemed to soften, and her eyes seemed almost sad, as if she knew what he was thinking. Maybe she did. "I love you too, sweetheart." Then, to lighten the mood, she added, "I must to put up with you." 

"You're a martyr," he agreed, and pulled her in for a kiss. 

He didn't know why he was even worried. He was never going to let anything happen to her. 

** 

    "What the hell have you done?" Jean exclaimed in horror, appearing just beyond the hole in the side of the building. 

Aware of what she was about to do, Bob quickly said, "No powers." She was going to throw him through the other wall, he was certain of that. He then told her, "I killed Heydon." He then pulled the knife out of Logan's chest, and it made a distressing wet noise that made Jean both flinch and pale in horror. 

"You killed Logan!" She scrambled towards him, and Bob quickly stood aside, slipping the knife back in his boot sheath. She was still so angry she might try and hit him, and that would only hurt her. 

"He will recover, Jean," he told her, thinking she already should have known. "A knife through the heart is not enough to kill Logan." 

"You don't know that," she snapped, quickly moving to Logan's side. She placed her left hand over the wound - which was not bleeding - and placed her right hand on his throat, seeking a pulse. Of course there was none, and he thought the lack of blood coming from the wound would have been a giveaway there. 

Her head snapped around violently and she glared at him, lips thinned and angry tears rolling down her cheeks. "He's dead, you son of a bitch." 

"Give him a minute." 

It was good he took her powers off line, or she might have tried to explode his head. "A minute? People don't recover from death. Unlike for you it is not a temporary condition." 

He smirked, knowing it was bad for his health but unable to keep himself from doing it anyways. "Yeah, hon, it is for him. I think he sometimes wishes it wasn't." 

She looked perfectly livid, and was weighing whether or not hitting or kicking him would be safer. "His healing factor doesn't work if he's dead." 

"You'd be surprised at how much his body doesn't want to stay dead." 

Her lips thinned until they virtually disappeared, and he knew he was in for some verbal thrashing when she suddenly gasped and turned back to Logan. He knew why too - he'd seen his hand twitch. "Oh my god," she gasped, putting her head to his chest as if trying to hear the healing process at work, kick starting his systems again. She sat back, and ripped open his shirt a bit more, to get a better look at the knife wound, and from the way her spine stiffened, he bet she was now watching the skin seal itself shut. "How did you know?" She asked breathlessly, as he saw and well as heard Logan take an involuntary breath. Back from the dead. 

"Because Heydon hadn't lied," he told her, knowing she'd hate the answer. "He has stabbed himself in the heart. It didn't work then, and there's no reason why it would work now." 

She turned to face him, but slowly. She was still crying, and perhaps still a little mad at him, but that was being washed away by relief that Logan was still alive. "Why would he ... I don't understand ..." 

"You've never been that swamped by anger and despair, Jean? I know I have. I thought it was part and parcel of the Human condition. And yeah, I'm aware I'm not Human, but play along. You know what I mean." 

She stared at him a moment, then turned back towards Logan, shaking her head, her ponytail slapping up against her shoulder. "I can't understand why anyone would do that, especially Logan. He doesn't quit." 

"Have you ever considered that he doesn't have much of a choice?" 

No, he bet she didn't. And he had never had a choice either. 

    18 

    The first thing he realized was the awful burning sensation in his chest. 

He thought he had been ... he had been somewhere ... Mariko, with her, somewhere ... and now he wasn't. Now he was trapped in the dark shell of his body, which felt like it was on fire. 

( But he'd never actually left, had he? No, he'd always been right here ... ) 

Blood roared in his ears like a river, his heart thudded like it was trying to smash through his chest cavity and escape the burning, but he distantly became aware of other sounds ... voices ... pain, burning; he was hurt, had been hurt ... were the voices connected? 

Adrenaline surged through him, and he could taste blood as well as smell it - his, all his. 

He lurched upward, consciousness back if not his memories, and the first thing he saw was a startled woman beside him. He reached for her, not sure if she was dangerous or not, but not willing to wait and find out. 

"Logan, freeze!" A man shouted, and to his horror he did just that; he became as still as a statue. He tried to move, but it was like he'd completely forgotten how. "You remember," the man said, and Logan did. 

Ah shit. 

"You can let me go now," he said, feeling angry, ashamed, and really desperate to kill something. 

Bob must have, because he almost fell back over, and Jean threw her arms around him and hugged him fiercely. "Oh god, Logan, are you all right?" His first instinct was to shove her away because she was not Mariko, but then he realized what a stupid thought that was. 

He patted her consolingly on the back, feeling her tears on his neck, and said, "Yeah, I'm okay, considering." He glanced at Bob, who was standing off to the left, looking uncomfortable. "You stabbed me in the fucking heart." 

Bob just shrugged. "Sorry 'bout that." 

He really wasn't that angry at him - he did what he had to do, and he did kill that motherfucker Heydon - but it was the principal of the thing. He also shot him in the head, but to be fair he had encouraged that. "You okay?" He asked Jean, figuring she was. But why the tears? 

"I'm fine," she said, sniffing. She pulled back and studied his face carefully, as if making sure it was him and not Heydon, and he was almost positive she was about to kiss him. 

"Is it over?" Scott asked, his words slightly nasal and slurred. 

He was standing before the huge hole in the wall with Storm right next to him, and it was unclear if he was holding her up or she was holding him up. She looked the best out of both of them, as Scott's face was crusted with dried blood and starting to swell up like a boil, but at least he had his visor back on. 

Jean pulled back and moved away, aware of how awkward things must have looked, and Bob said, "All over but the suing." 

"You gonna be okay?" Logan asked Scott. Not that he cared, but the guy looked like he was barely able to stand. 

Scott shrugged, and said, still sounding like he had a bad head cold, "I'll recover." After a pause, he added, "I'm really going to have to sit down in a minute." 

"Let's get the fuck outta here," Logan agreed, standing up. He almost fell over himself, his chest still burning with the remnants of healing, but Jean stood up and caught his arm, helping him up. Of course he almost fell over and took her with him, but then Bob was on the other side of him, a hand braced against his back. What a sad group they were. 

"We won, right?" Logan asked sarcastically. 

"Hard to tell, isn't it?" Bob replied cheerfully. 

One of these days, it would be nice to not limp away from something. 

** 

Three Days Later - Westchester, New York 

    Maybe Nariko was fitting in too well. 

Apparently she was changing stuff into other stuff for everyone, and while it made her relatively popular, it wasn't good to exploit her powers like that. She'd been talked to about it, and seemed willing to knock it off, but Logan had a feeling she'd go back to it. It was working for her - why stop? 

He finished packing up and slung the bag over his shoulder, hoping he didn't run into Jean again. He'd been avoiding her since L.A., mainly because of the beat down that Heydon put on Scott (but that was his own fault - he shouldn't have attacked him like that ), but also because he just didn't feel like dealing with her and her issues and baggage right now. Or maybe it was his issues and baggage - he didn't know, and he didn't care. He just needed to get out of here for a while. 

It was the afternoon of a sunny Saturday, and the school seemed as empty as it ever got. He was glad, because it increased his chances of sneaking out that much more. He walked quietly down the hall, all senses alert for anyone who might intercept him. He really didn't want to talk to anyone; he just needed some time to think. He wasn't completely sure about what yet - there was so much shit that had happened, that was still happening - but he figured his thought processes would be clearer with distance, solitude, and beer. 

He made it to the front hallway when he saw the dust motes suspended in a beam of sunlight swirl violently, and then Bob appeared, stepping out of some sort of rip in reality. "Ha! My turn to catch ya before you leave," he said, donning black sunglasses even as he stepped out of the light. 

Logan shifted his knapsack to his other shoulder and scowled at him, knowing it wouldn't do any good at all. "Can't you bug me later?" 

"No, come on, aren't you the least bit curious about Miranda?" 

That was why Bob had come back - to see if he could bring her out of her coma. Logan had no doubt that he could. "You brought her out. End of story." 

"Well, not quite." He was now standing between Logan and the door, and he knew that he had done that on purpose. Now that Bob was out of the sun, he took off the glasses and hung them from the collar of his red t - shirt. "She's now in regret mode over what she's done, and I think we don't have to worry about her powers or brain damage any more." 

Logan really didn't want to have a conversation, but there was no escaping Bob. "Why?" 

"Because she accidentally wished it away." 

He stared at him a moment, waiting for more, but no, Bob was going to make him work for this. "You mean she wished she didn't have her powers, and she doesn't?" 

"No, she wished she was normal. And now she is." 

"How is that possible? How could her powers undo themselves?" 

Bob shrugged half - heartedly, then admitted, "Both mutants and demons aren't playing on a level field. Almost anything can happen, and often does. I think her powers basically imploded. I wouldn't be surprised if the energy the Zayrith left behind somehow contributed to it all." 

He almost felt sorry for the kid. "What's gonna happen to her now?" 

"I'm gonna do my best to repair reality, and find her her place in it. She'll be okay, if not exactly a mutant anymore." 

"Yeah, well, maybe that's for the best. Can I go now?" 

"No. Where are you going?" 

He continued to frown at him, knowing it was pointless. "Are you my mother now?" 

"Not in this form, no. Although anything's possible - I was quite a slut in my day." 

Bob was impossible. He was almost willing to believe in karma, as that might explain him perfectly. "Look, I'm going away, if that's okay with you. And even if it ain't, I don't care." 

"They think you're taking the Heydon thing kinda hard." 

Almost a non - sequitur, but not quite. "What do you mean?" 

"Telepaths know when they're bein' avoided, mate. They think you're tryin' to work through your Heydon possession." 

Logan shrugged. "I didn't like it, but it's over." 

"Right. Well they think that's what the avoidance is all about. I know that's not it." 

He glared at him. "What did you tell them?" 

"Nothing. It's not for me to say." 

"Damn right it's not." He started moving forward, vainly hoping Bob would move to avoid collision, but no, of course not. He stopped about a foot away from him, and let his pack slide down his arm, letting it thud to the floor. "What do you want from me, Bob?" 

"I want you to talk about it before you explode and take it out on some stupid drunk redneck who, admittedly, will probably be asking for it." Bob crossed his arms over his chest and assumed a stubborn posture that suggested Logan would have to forcibly move him. Which he would have gladly done, except Bob wasn't about to let him. 

"I don't wanna talk about it." 

"Yes you do." 

"Don't tell me what I fucking want, Bob. Do you want me to say it? Fine. I'm losing my fucking mind. Now will you get outta my way?" 

Bob gave him a look that skirted the edge of pity. "They can't hear us, Logan, and no one's gonna be barging in on us." 

He sighed wearily. No escape at all. "You lowered the cone of silence, huh?" 

Bob smiled faintly. "And they say you have no sense of humor." 

"Who says?" 

"People who really don't know you very well. Now why do you think you're losing your mind?" 

"You know why - you can hear my thoughts, can't you?" 

"Mariko." 

Just hearing her name felt like a punch to the heart. "The more I remember, the more I can't stand it. I think maybe it would have been better if I never remembered her at all." He felt evil just admitting that, but how much was he supposed to take? He had failed a lot of people, but Mariko was probably his greatest failure. 

"It wasn't your fault," Bob said softly. 

He chuckled humorlessly, feeling an aimless surge of anger. It would have been wasted on Bob. "Don't, just ... don't. I need to go here, okay?" 

"Entropy happens, mate. Circumstances can screw the best of us." 

"Please, just shut the hell up." 

"You know why it hurts so much? Because your memories of her make this relationship fresh, and at the very same time her loss and the grief are fresh too. You can't win; it's as painful as all fuck and I'm really sorry, Logan." 

"You're sorry?" He closed his eyes a moment, reigning in the anger and the bizarre appearance of tears in his eyes. 'Mariko honey,' he thought sadly, 'you're killing me'. As soon as he was sure they were gone, he asked, "Can you take them away?" 

"What?" 

He opened his eyes again, not surprised to find Bob looking at him with a sort of horrified fascination. "The memories of her. I feel like a monster just asking, but maybe I forgot for a reason. I know what everyone thinks, that I'm some insanely brave asshole, but I'm not: I'm a fucking coward. Why do they think I've been running for the last fifteen years of my life? I can't do it anymore, Bob, I can't. I'm so fucking tired." 

"You're a lot of things, mate, but never a coward." He then put on an exaggerated Aussie accent, and added, "Stupid maybe, but not a coward." 

Logan vaguely recognized it as a "Road Warrior" reference, but he was in no mood for his jokes. "I'm serious, Bob." 

"So am I. I know you won't believe me, but I've been where you are. And there is no worse feeling in the world than helplessness as you watch someone you love die, and there's nothing you can do to stop it." 

"That's just it, Bob - I could have stopped it. If I was just smart enough - " 

"No." 

" - she'd probably still be alive. I could have - " 

"No," Bob insisted, louder this time. "Her family sold her out, Logan - they threw the both of you to the wolves. You were betrayed by the people closest to you, and there was no way to win. It was a tragic, King Lear - ish fucking mess, and the only way to have won was by never playin' at all." 

"I probably saw it comin'." 

"Possibly. But sometimes even foresight isn't enough. Ask Chuck if you don't believe me." 

"You're not going to take it away, are you?" 

"Hasn't your mind been fucked with enough?" 

There was no answer to that, so he let it pass. "Okay then, Bob, tell me something honestly: is there an afterlife?" 

That really stunned him. Apparently even mind reading wasn't enough. "What?" 

"Just what I said. Is there an afterlife? Heaven, hell, all that shit. And I know about Hell being an alternate dimension, but you know what I mean." 

Bob sighed and ran a hand through his golden brown hair, barely mussing it. "Like with a lot of things, Christianity really got it wrong. Buddhism and Hinduism got closer, but not by much." 


	10. Part 10

He thought the only thing they had in common was polytheism, and a tendency to be mistaken for one another by ignorant Westerners. But maybe there was something else. "Are you sayin' reincarnation?" 

"No. Well, not exactly. Again, physics - energy isn't destroyed, just transmuted. If the question is is there a heaven or a hell that Human souls go to when they die, the answer is no." 

He noted the parsing. "Human?" 

"People touched by the supernatural and non - Humans often play by different rules. If a demon has a soul it might be shunted back to the plane where it originated from; if you're a Human unlucky enough to get vamped, your soul can get caught in a sort of a limbo state called the Ether, really an adjunct of the dimension where vampires originated from. Slayers get a special martyrs nook I believe, courtesy of the PTB's." 

"What would happen to you?" He wondered, not actually expecting an answer. 

Bob didn't disappoint. He simply smiled, and said, "You know I can't tell you that." 

"No, you won't." 

"Trust me, I can't. It wouldn't be good for your health."  Logan raised an eyebrow at him - was that an actual threat? - but Bob pressed on. "The brain wants to keep its vessel - the body - alive no matter what, so sometimes at the moment of death or severe physical distress, it will feed us images of things that just might encourage us to keep alive. For some people, that's fear of a hot place where Hitler rams a hot poker up your ass; for others, it's moments of peace, maybe a reunion with loved ones who have died before us. Or a memory of our wi -" 

"Don't," Logan warned him. He knew exactly how that statement was going to end. 

Bob looked faintly exasperated with him, but seemingly refused to get angry. "It's not Mariko who's killing you. It's your perceived sense of guilt." 

"If I needed a psych consult, I'd ask." 

"The cabin in Lac des Cygnes is still open." 

"I don't need your charity." 

"It's not charity, Logan. It never has been. It is a safe and secluded place to stay. Think about it." 

"If I agree to, will you let me go?" 

Bob nodded. 

"I'll think about it. Are we through now?" 

Although he did it reluctantly, Bob stepped aside, unfolding his arms and gesturing towards the door behind him.   

As Logan shouldered his bag once more, he did a double take as he realized Rogue was in the hallway with them. "She can't see you," Bob assured him, just as Rogue said, "Hey Bob, have you seen Logan?" 

"He just left," Bob replied, as Logan walked around him and headed for the door. He knew Bob was doing him a favor, but he just couldn't muster up feeling grateful right now. 

"Damn it," Rogue cursed. "I was hopin' he could stick around a bit longer this time." 

Logan opened the door, wondering if she could see that, but not really caring. He just wanted to get away before he really lost his mind. 

    19 

    Logan wondered if there was an irony god. He had forgotten to ask Bob, but then again, Bob might be the irony god. It would make a certain amount of sense. 

He had parked his motorcycle on the soft shoulder of the road and was now sitting on the ground and leaning his back against it, opposite to the direction of the kickstand. He felt like an idiot, and knew damn well he should. 

He didn't know why he'd driven up here to drop in unannounced at Naomi's - what did he intend to say? All he knew was he wanted to see her, make sure she was doing okay. 

But she didn't live here anymore. 

Her parents did; they even remembered him from last time. They were very nice, told him that she had gotten restless and decided to move on with her life. Xavier had used some of his contacts, and she now lived and worked at a lab doing some secret work for Xavier ( is that how he got all his cool gizmos? ) at a lab in Minneapolis. She'd been there for a couple of weeks, and they said she sounded very happy. 

Nobody told him. Why didn't anybody tell him? 

Maybe because he was never around, or maybe because he never asked. He should have been angry - and he was angry, no doubt about that - but mostly he was simply disappointed. She was moving on with her life. 

What the hell was he doing? 

It was a nice day; sunny and warm, but not in the harsh, blast furnace way that L.A. had been. He had parked the bike in the shade of a spreading elm, and the sun was dappled as it shined through its branches, appearing as spots of gold on the street that moved with every breeze. 

He should move on, but he felt like his legs had been kicked out from under him, and he had no great desire to get up again. What the hell did he think he was doing? And where the fuck did he think he was going? 

He was not starting over. He was forever stuck in a past he could barely remember, and often wanted to forget. 

Logan looked at the scrap of paper in his hand one more time. It had Naomi's new address and phone number on it. He could go there, see her ... but why? She was just a weird guy who may have been her boyfriend once, but was now reduce to just guy whose skin grows back instantly. He could drive all the way there, she could be nice to him and share a cup of coffee and several awkward pauses, and he would be reminded once more the Naomi he knew was dead, and he had simply never existed for her. He was already depressed - did he really need to make it worse? 

What did you do when every step forward seemed like another step back? 

He folded the piece of paper and shoved it in the front pocket of his jeans. He'd give her a call sometime, see how she was doing that way; no need to go and do it in person. She might start thinking he was a crazed stalker or something. 

Finally he forced himself to move, reaching up and grabbing a handlebar to help lever himself up to his feet. He had to be careful, though, as he knew he was strong enough to not only pull the bike over but actually rip the front end off, and how would that do him any good? 

He still had no idea what he wanted to do, or where he wanted to go, but he knew he had to be alone for a while, until he coud get his head straight. Okay, that was never going to happen - straighter, then. 

He didn't want to pay another visit to Bob's cabin again, as nice and out of the way as it was. He didn't want anyone to know where he was for the time being. Okay, Bob always seemed to be able to find him, and Xavier could always slapped on his Cerebro thingymabob and find him if he wanted to. But Bob must have known by now that he really wanted to be left alone, and he could pass that on to Xavier. It wasn't that he'd never come back, it was just he needed a break right now. Gods knew from what, but hey, he had never been known for his rationality. 

He straddled his bike and kicked back the kickstand before revving the engine. He had no idea where he was going; right now he was just going to drive, and see where that took him before he ran out of gas. 

Okay, it wasn't much of a plan. But it was his, and for right now that was enough. 

**** 

The End 


End file.
